Why Influence Is Moving From Individuals to Communities
For the past 15 years, influencer marketing was a surefire way to promote your brand. Find someone with an audience, pay them to talk about your product, and let the sales come in. Early influencers worked because they felt relatable. Their rooms looked familiar, their opinions felt honest, and most importantly, their product recommendations made sense. It felt like asking a friend, “Which one should I get?”
But that dynamic hasn’t been the same in a while. Influencers aren’t gone; they just aren’t the same. What has replaced this is communities like comment sections, Subreddits, Discord servers, Substack, and anywhere else people congregate on the internet. Influence is no longer coming from the top.
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Reliable Reliability
The original appeal of influencers was them feeling like your friend. They were grounded in reality and didn’t feel like brand puppets. There usually wasn’t a script; everything felt organic. Over time, that process became manufactured. Opinions felt filtered, language turned corporate, and there was a growing sense that influencers valued a brand’s paycheck over their audience.
When every other post is an ad and every opinion has to be cleared by the brand, trust disappears. Simply put, this failed because influence rose from authenticity. And this cycle keeps repeating itself. An influencer gains traction by being genuine through skits and rants. Then comes a post that feels too “brandy” and they appear out of touch.
People Like Me
As this cycle continued to play out, attention shifted. People didn’t stop looking for recommendations; they just changed where they looked. Instead of being force-fed products in their feed, people started typing what they are in the market for into Google and adding “reddit” to the end. Because who are you going to trust more? Someone reading from a brand’s script, or the person in a Reddit thread saying, “I bought it a couple of years ago and still like it,” with hundreds of upvotes?
Many people online choose the latter because there is no incentive for these opinions other than answering honestly. Think about purchases you made in the past two years versus those you made ten years ago. There’s a strong chance your more recent purchases were influenced by community opinion.
What This Means for Brands
The takeaway shouldn’t be to abandon influencer marketing altogether. Instead, brands need to unclench their grip on the process and let it do its thing. This could mean sending products to micro-influencers without a script and trusting what you’re selling enough to let them speak freely, good or bad. That freedom increases trust. It also gives smaller creators a chance to connect with their audience authentically.
Another thought is moving from controlling the narrative to actually listening. There is real value buried in Reddit threads and comment sections. Those insights can shape better products, which can be promoted through paid media in the same places people already gather. Ads will always interrupt, but this approach allows brands to act like brands and communities to remain communities.
To conclude, for brands looking to stay relevant, cultural literacy is not optional. The marketing landscape keeps changing, and those who don’t pause to observe those changes will get left behind. The brands that survive are the ones that notice patterns, listen closely, and understand where people actually are. The next time you begin a campaign, start by researching where the conversation is already happening.