In 1922, Ravindra Nath Tagore endorsed Godrej Soap. This is one of the earliest forms of Influencer Marketing in Modern India.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy that involves endorsements and product placement from people and organizations who have expert-level knowledge, social Influence & or the ability to create an impact in their field. Influencers help in the generation, communication & adoption of a message.

They can contribute to any or all the above stages of message communication.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, Three types of Influencers are responsible for the generation, communication & adoption of messages

a.    Connectors (Having wide reach with a variety of peoples)

b.    Mavens share trends & Insights on particular topic

c.    charismatic persuaders (Their influence is the tendency of others to imitate their behavior).

Most people assume that Influencer Marketing is a new concept, however, Influencers have been guiding consumers' decisions for a long time. If you look closely, only the mode of communication & storytelling has changed over time to better reach the target audience.

Influencer marketing is based on a very old concept that opinions we trust can move us to action. People with authority, expertise, interesting personality & art of communication have always influenced people from time immemorial. Orators, Poets, Kings, Religious leaders & experts have set trends and have been marketing for ages.

However, Influencer Marketing as a branding tool in Modern India was introduced by multinational companies in the early 1900s. The evolution of Influencer marketing in the Consumer Market was driven by two main factors:-

1. The type of Influencers: If you imagine a community of Influencers as a set, then this has been growing & evolving. It was originally Mythical Characters like Santa Claus, Or God Figures (Eg Goddess Lakshmi), then celebrities, now it includes Bloggers, Vloggers & Content Creators
2. The Medium: Reach is decided by the popular media (The Medium) of a given period. Medium means Print Media, TV, Radio, Movies, Social Media

Over a period of time, the Influencers & Medium both have evolved in a way that today Influencers also hold the power of Medium through social media.

Some of the earliest examples of Influencer marketing can be seen in 1920, Where an Ad by pears shows a woman who resembles Goddess Lakshmi endorsing Pears.

As the Bollywood & popular sports Industry boomed, some people became celebrities with immense social influence. It began the era of celebrity Advertising. Here are a few popular examples

When Television entered the market, it became a powerful medium for Influencers. And this started the Era of TV ads. Here is s link to some of the old Indian Ads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZlkUswEo8k

This continued till the 90s until google started gaining popularity. With Google, blogs gained a lot of popularity. People were soon making digital diaries, how-to guides,and top ten lists blogs. Soon content uploaded on Youtube started gaining popularity as vlogging. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Linkedin coming into picture, social media revolutionized the way people were spending their time. With more and more companies trying to get a piece of consumer's mindshare, brands started tying up with content creators on these platforms.

As of 2019, the average time spent by a person on social media is 154 minutes

Traditionally, Influencers & Medium were generally two separate entities, but with the rise of Nano, Micro & Macro Influencers, not only a new set of Influencers have been added to the Influencer Community but these new age Influencers have the power of Medium & Influencing in their control making them extremely effective.

According to a report by Influencer Marketing Hub, Influencer Marketing Industry is set to grow to approximately $9.7B in 2020. With these figures, e can confidently say that Content Creator has become the front runner in the modern age Influencer marketing