Let the Brand-Buyer Beware

Photo Credit: David Lee (with photo remix)

I’m juvenile. I can never resist a good food fight, especially when it’s a bout between The Food Babe and The Science Babe, both are influential and vocal food safety bloggers. The Food Babe is pro-organic, anti-GMO, and characteristically influences her readers with questionable level of scientific backing, while the Science Babe is hard science with a hint of humor.

From charts dealing with Facebook post and like, we see The Science Babe gaining on The Food Babe. However, when we look at Share Count per Like, the pattern shows The Food Babe’s virality is consistent, despite her decreasing exposure.

Source: QSearch Trend

For brand that engages influencers to reach the business’ target audience, they must keep in mind the two archetypes of influencers, the promoter and the provocateur. From the Science Babe’s performance, we see occasional provocation but overall, the Science Babe is promoting sound science, with the occasional sensationalism. Where at The Food Babe’s provocation is near constant, as inferred by the spiking shares.

Source: QSearch Trend

The danger of the provocateur influencer is that, in order to maintain the same level of audience outrage, the influencer moves towards more dramatic and extreme rhetorics. However, the dramatic draws in new readers because of the novelty, while the extreme rhetorics pushes readers away. The result is an influencer relying on outrage and provocation, in the long run, find themselves in the fringe position. They usually have a stable core of supporters, but growth is difficult to achieve. This can easily be seen in The Food Babe’s message’s constant virality with declining exposure.

When engaging an influencer, a brand must take into the influencer’s stance and method of influence, else they risk brand impairment. It may be entertaining to hire influencers and watch the food fight, but the careless brands will usually end up with eggs on their faces.

Written by Roger Do