Breaking free from the algorithm: How brands can win back consumers through creativity

Originally published in Modern Retail

The sales-driven, influencer-audience dynamic of the past few years is being disrupted. In the pursuit of quick growth, many brands have leaned too far into performance marketing at the cost of long-term, values-based brand building. As consumers grow wary of being sold to in new and more intrusive ways, brands are facing a critical moment: adapt to the changing landscape and demands of conscientious consumers or risk being left behind.

A recent Collective Bias study found that only 3 percent of consumers are influenced by celebrity endorsements, signalling that the days of sales-oriented influencer marketing may be numbered. Instead, audiences want to listen to a different kind of influencer, one with specific expertise who has credentials to make trustworthy assessments of a product or service, based on informed opinions rather than scripted promotions.

It’s easy to forget that the influencer model started as a way to break with business-driven marketing before being named as such. It was initially a breath of fresh air, away from the highly staged world of the big brand campaigns that preceded social media. In the early days of the ‘everyday influencer’, visual media platforms provided a way to enter, explore and aspire to entire lifestyles, which were presented by real people with a creative eye and flair.

Once this was professionalised, it transformed into something less organic and more staged. As the New Yorker describes, ‘influence’ comes from the Latin word for ‘inflow’, an image of how our thoughts now stream into one another’s pockets every second. With this, the era of an earnest, visual aesthetic ended the moment ‘influencer’ became a professional title.

From sales-makers to tastemakers

In search of that lost authenticity, could we be turning back to expert-led influencing? Perhaps a return to ‘authentic tastemakers’ – those with true expertise and style, especially on platforms like TikTok? These ‘specialists’ range from psychologists recommending specific therapies responding to different traumas to hairdressers endorsing lesser-known and more affordable products and routines.

The primary difference with their closest predecessors (the professional influencer of Instagram fame) is that they focus as much on de-influencing, the practice of calling out overhyped and over-promoted products that don’t live up to expectations, as they do on platforming so-called hero products. Instead, they are selling us expertise and authenticity in a way that neither celebrity endorsements nor professional influencers can compete with. By many accounts, Jennifer Lopez’s ‘olive oil’ range failed to hit cult status precisely because few believed that her flawless skin was down to this simple ingredient. Consumers fundamentally considered the sell to be dishonest.

Instead, in this new era, where consumers are looking for credible voices to guide their tastes and choices, brands need to steer marketing strategies into more relevant and authentic values. As Kyle Chayka puts it, “We crave content with evidence that a real person actually stands behind the products or works being touted”. He goes even further to say that in the age of AI, sometimes we even just need to know that the influencer is a human being.

Chasing trends and relying on algorithms plays into a business-led approach which is, arguably, how a crisis of authenticity (exacerbated by GenAI) started in the first place. With large language models being used more and more for styling tips, medical diagnoses, and even career advice, there’s a demonstrated hunger for an expert-led truth. Although some reactive brands might attempt to exploit this by embedding themselves into exchanges with AI, responsible and forward-thinking brands will prioritise transparency, delivering value through every interaction with customers, effectively future-proofing their strategy by getting closer to user needs.

Ultimately, algorithms don’t create trends; they amplify what resonates. Take timeless, iconic figures in fashion, such as Anna Wintour. Wintour formulates an idea which becomes the germinating seed for trends and as a tastemaker par excellence, she embodies the classic creative visionary quality which used to be famed as a lighthouse of creative industries.

A return to creative brand building for retailers

Luxury fashion houses and trendsetters in the retail space have, arguably, grown complacent. They’ve stopped being creative and interacting with the more artistic elements of their output. By leaning heavily into mass production, fashion in particular has become more business-focused and less art-led.

Consumer sentiment now indicates an appetite for something fresh. Where fashion brands have prioritised bottom-of-funnel performance marketing, a return to longer-term, purposeful, and emotionally led brand building would likely pay dividends.

Representing core demographics will be key to this. Brands should bring back creative directors with bigger mandates than their COOs and engage seriously with designers and marketers who resonate with their audiences and are at the forefront of the industry. The fall of big fashion houses’ credibility is undoubtedly related to their lack of diversity and relevant voices, making them increasingly irrelevant to younger, progressive, and fashion-forward segments. Despite the increasing urgency of this discussion, boardrooms and creative control are still held by a handful of predominantly white, powerful men, while the same brands have deflected by ‘diversity washing’ performatively on their catwalks.

Redefining consumption in 2024 and the new frontier of demand-led retail

Back in the 90s, high fashion was largely inaccessible until affordable mass producers such as Zara and H&M democratised the high street. However, the mindset around consumption has changed substantially since then. People care more about brands and products complementing their values. There’s a new perspective around consumption that is (happily) difficult to ‘greenwash’ or ‘ethics wash’ away from.

This is where the product-centric element of successful marketing strategies needs adjusting. The race to the bottom of the supply chain for maximum speed and volume in production versus minimum product quality and ecological considerations is clear to many. On platforms like TikTok, for example, users often celebrate vintage high-street finds from brands like H&M and Marks & Spencer, known for their former durability. What if brands explored this specific idea with a strategy capitalising on the bygone era of quality? It’s easy to imagine how this might play out creatively and commercially, within the contemporary social media discourse.

That said, brands like The Frankie Shop and Sezane are already leading this charge. These retailers focus on principles like demand-led, small batch production. Customers often find themselves (happily) waiting to be told when products will become available again, and paying a higher unit cost, due to a logical exchange for an ethical and higher quality purchasing decision. This cognitive connection could be a key growth factor in a retail industry which has exhausted the conveyor belt to convenience maxim.

Working from a scarcity model in this way can also lead to a reemergence of subcultures – a theoretically dying phenomenon, which suffered from a double hit of social media and fast fashion aesthetics, breeding an endless supply of different signifiers, watered down and sold at low cost, so that everyone could softly play dress up in styles which previously implied deep musical, values-based and political views, but devoid of this key meaning.

It stands to reason that making more deliberate choices about specific pieces that you invest in requires loyalty to a certain style. By creating movements rather than moments, brands can build long-term connections with their audiences, cultivating loyalty that extends beyond a single transaction. It can be difficult to remember that Timberland boots once signalled an affiliation with east coast hip-hop, which defined the 1990s, or that heavy denim ensembles were a staple of punk rock in the 1980s. What would the retail landscape look like if brands and products held a more meaningful, intentional message about their wearers?

Turning back to move forward

Developing innovative, desirable retail and fashion products while generating demand for them can’t be primarily data-driven. Guys in suits with spreadsheets will always churn out derivatives, falling into the fatal trap of imitating that which has come before for a short-term profit swell that buries the brand value in the same landfill that most of the excess produce ends up in.

Creativity and, above all, authenticity are the key characteristics that audiences are looking for when making purchasing decisions in 2024. The brands that focus on these principles will end up leading the conversation rather than following the algorithm. More importantly, they are able to reshape a much bigger conversation about consumption and care, both up and downstream in a troubled industry that needs, desperately, to turn a page.