Social media influencers (SMIs) exist in a liminal space between consumers and brands, between audiences and advertisers, and their position in digital media culture has become increasingly fraught. Shen and colleagues (2022) explained, “While influencer marketing is proven to bring a boost in sales volumes, its commercial nature also inevitably shows and breeds a trust crisis from consumers” (p. 1). In this paper, I explain why the trust crisis long predates influencer marketing and is due to the advertising industry’s routine violations of Kantian ethics, specifically the universalizability principle (Ess, 2020), the categorical imperative against dishonesty (Biss, 2017), and the principle of humanity (Plaisance, 2014). I will also discuss how influencers are in a unique position to either take these unethical practices to greater extremes or to push back against these practices for the sake of their own and their audiences’ humanity. I will discuss marketing research indicating that audience response to influencer behavior can be a useful barometer and enforcer of influencer and brand ethics, which suggests that marketing professionals should consider addressing the trust crisis systemically by incorporating ethics into their practice.
Influencer marketing developed in response to audiences’ growing ability to avoid advertising (Leung et al., 2022). Even before digital media usage became widespread, marketing researchers like Speck and Elliott (1997) studied advertising avoidance, puzzling over which audiences did not want to be reached and why. As traditional ad formats became more easily avoided and less effective, advertising professionals identified influencer marketing as a powerful tool precisely because, as Shen and colleagues (2020) noted, “The para-social relationship between SMIs and followers lead followers to believe content that originates from SMIs is sincere, noncommercial-driven, and essentially different from marketer-initiated communication [emphasis added]” (p. 2). Followers expect noncommercial speech from influencers and consider influencers to be fellow consumers sharing their honest opinions (Pradhan et al., 2023). The value of influencers to advertisers is that audiences do not perceive them as advertisers, which hints at the shaky ethical ground upon which influencer marketing sits.
Regarding influencers’ role in the process, Wellman and colleagues (2020) noted that “authenticity” has emerged as a framework by which influencers make ethical decisions. Influencers are very conscious of the value of authenticity (Khamis et al., 2017; Wellman et al., 2020), openly sharing details about their personal lives to construct a relatable and consistent persona and gain the audience’s trust. Wellman and colleagues (2020) found that this authenticity informs their ethical decisions regarding brand sponsorships, leading influencers to reject brands that would require them to produce inauthentic content: “Ethics, for them, … means presenting their experiences as honestly as possible, while keeping the audience in mind. An ethics centered on brand identity and audience keeps influencers focused on creating sponsored content that fits their established image, which they see as their promise to readers” (Wellman et al., 2020, p. 74).
The first ethical breach occurs when influencers allow brands to have creative control over sponsored content. Vdovychenko (2019) noted, “thousands of influencer commercial messages have been created by the brands themselves. In the process of negotiating product promotion contracts, companies can provide a long list of details regarding how the product should appear in a post, including product positioning, color palette, and even preferred filters.” By posting what the brand requires, rather than what the influencer thinks and feels, the influencer breaks the tacit promise that the content they post is their own, violating Kant’s universalizability principle: Only do that which you would want everyone to do (Plaisance, 2014). Ess (2020) explains, “a Kantian analysis would ask the question: what sort of social/moral order would result if everyone were to break a promise whenever doing so would result in at least more immediate, short-term pleasure?” (p. 228). Specifically, if everyone on social media was selling their place in their followers’ feeds to brands, no one would know whether they are hearing from each other or from a brand. Further, social media would be full of the ads that most users (including, presumably, influencers) are so keen to avoid.
This reality is already upon us, and influencers are largely responsible. Shen and colleagues (2022) wrote, “According to a recent survey, nearly 40% of consumers complain about seeing too much branded content on social media and 48% of them are starting to distrust influencers” (p. 10). Shen and colleagues (2022) developed a methodology for social media platforms to detect these sponsored posts, which are often not labeled as sponsored. The study, among other contributions, “demonstrates that incorporating brand-generated posts is efficient in capturing brand encroachment despite SMIs’ effort in linguistically disguising it. By doing so, this study delivers applicative contribution on the algorithm design for sponsored post detection” (p. 10). Sponsored posts often resemble brand posts so closely that machine learning can flag them as likely sponsored, which shows how tightly the brand controls the message.
This type of commercial speech masquerading as noncommercial speech is a form of stealth marketing, which influencers profit from facilitating. Martin and Smith (2008) noted that stealth marketing employs deception, violating Kant’s categorical imperative not to lie, and has possible “longer-term adverse consequences, such as denigration of the brand, heightened distrust of business in general and marketing in particular, and the potential social harm of seemingly sincere human interactions proving to be inauthentic.” Whereas consumer distrust of marketing is problematic mostly for advertisers, the continued degradation of human interactions is of profound ethical concern for the rest of us and particularly for influencers who traffic in human interactions.
Not only is brand-created sponsored content unpleasant for digital media users (Kim & Seo, 2017; Shen et al., 2022), marketing research has shown that it does not benefit influencers or brands in the long term either. Pradhan and colleagues (2023) provided a detailed analysis of what makes Gen Z audiences reject an influencer or a brand and discovered that “Gen Z consumers consider the act of surreptitiously pushing the agenda of brands for commercial gain insincere and immoral. Moreover, this runs contrary to their expectations of influencers, whom they had previously trusted and treated as honest content creators rather than covert developers of posts at the behest of brands” (p. 43). Having grown up in a time when consumers’ attempts to avoid ads are constantly thwarted by marketing professionals, Gen Z has developed a strong moral distaste for influencer content that veers into stealth marketing. Interestingly, Pradhan and colleagues (2023) noted that “when Gen Z perceives influencers to have succumbed to the control of brands and to have acted at their behest, they treat information presented by the influencers to be commercial in nature and, accordingly, dishonest [emphasis added]” (p. 29). Audiences sense that these advertising messages treat them as means to an end— in this case, profit—and they resist. Plaisance (2014) summarizes Kant’s principle of humanity, “Since everyone is an ‘end’ with absolute moral worth, I may not reduce anyone to a mere ‘means’ to accomplish a goal or task, for doing so denies their ability to live as rational beings” (p. 77).
In this case, authenticity does not serve as a useful ethical framework for influencer marketing. Ensuring content is consistent with an influencer’s general persona does not, in any way, ensure that it is noncommercial (Wellman et al., 2022), which is the audience expectation that brands aim to exploit. Nor does focusing on authenticity make content truthful, especially given how often influencers’ emphasis on aesthetics overrides concerns about accurately representing reality (Duffy & Hund, 2015; Wellman et al., 2022).
Interestingly, when influencer marketing research focuses on what audiences expect and appreciate (that is, when audiences are considered as ends unto themselves and not as mere means to turning a profit), an ethical framework begins to take shape. One maxim enforced by audiences, and therefore recognized as crucial for effectiveness, is influencer autonomy regarding content, which provides some protection against the stealth marketing practices that brands tend to employ. An influencer blurring the truth for aesthetic reasons that the audience might appreciate is not the same as blurring the truth because the sponsor requires them to. Advertisers should recognize that influencers’ value to them is not necessarily the audience they provide access to but their judgment about what content to post, which is how they cultivated a following in the first place.
When influencers are negotiating their autonomy, it is helpful for them to consider Kant’s remarks on individuals’ ethical obligations to themselves. These obligations, because the self is also a moral agent, are consistent with and equally important to one’s ethical obligations to others (Bunch, 2014). Kant, as cited in Bunch (2014), states, “The vices of lying, avarice, and servility ‘make [oneself] a plaything of the mere inclinations and hence a thing’. They ‘make it one’s basic principle to have no basic principle and hence no character, that is, to throw oneself away and make oneself an object of contempt’” (p. 73). When an influencer relinquishes control of their content to a brand, they succumb to all three of these vices, and in doing so reduce their own humanity and forfeit the respect they would otherwise be owed (Bunch, 2014). Their platform quickly loses all value, and what was once the audience’s destination becomes the billboard, television commercial, or pop-up ad that audiences reflexively avoid. In short, influencers should avoid being used as “a thing” by brands because their first ethical obligation is to not degrade themselves.
Regarding influencers’ ethical responsibilities to their audiences, honesty is a more useful framework than authenticity. Biss (2015) provided some useful insights in her discussion of how Kant’s perfect duty to avoid vice (in this case, lying about who created a post or about their true feelings about a product) provides some latitude for pursuing virtue (in this case, being honest). Biss (2015) wrote, “There is no mean between truthfulness and lying, however, there is a mean between candor and reticence. When deciding how much of the truth to share Kant recommends consulting the rules of prudence to determine what level of openness fits the situation” (p. 622). Influencers, whose willingness to share details of their lives is a critical component of their appeal to audiences (Chung & Cho, 2017; Hugh et al., 2022), intentionally create a quasi-friendship with audiences in order to earn their trust. Inviting that trust and benefitting from it obligates influencers to some of the ethical maxims of moral friendship. Biss (2017) explains, “The person who strives for moral friendship … must choose to share her thoughts more openly with another than would be strictly required by a basic commitment to truthfulness in order to foster the end of intimacy with another that is part of the end of friendship” (p. 629).
In this case, prudence calls for influencers to offer a high level of candor regarding their sponsored content, the bare minimum being to disclose relationships with brands. This is certainly easier when the influencer partners with brands they genuinely appreciate for reasons beyond the compensation they receive (Wellman et al., 2020), which are the only reasons the audience can appreciate. However, influencers should consider going a step further, to openly acknowledge how their compensation affects their decision-making. For example, Vosburgh (2016), a fashion influencer, wrote a particularly candid post, “Where it gets a bit tricky is when I’m feeling like I need to include something just to earn commission or if I’m reluctant to buy it because I can’t make commission on it. For example, it’s basically impossible to make commission on anything vintage!” This information offers the audience insight into what they see in her posts, reminding them that her purchase choices are guided by different factors than theirs are. This admission respects their agency and implicitly encourages them to make their own decisions based on their own situation.
This sort of candor also happens to contribute to influencer effectiveness. Hugh and colleagues (2022) noted, “Influencers should also be transparent for why to collaborate with brands as this will increase perceptions of altruistic motives [emphasis added]; the influencer is genuinely concerned about followers and only collaborates with brands for their benefit” (p. 3496). However, influencers should, again, take this a step further and analyze what even the most compatible brand sponsorships cost them and their audience. Vosburgh (2016) acknowledged, “Churning out too many collaborations at a time takes a lot out of me, creatively and physically (remember this all happens on nights and weekends), which has left me, on more than a few occasions, too drained to muster the inspiration and drive to create my own personal content.” She went on to explain her goal to limit sponsored posts in the coming year to focus more on her personal content.
Not only is influencer autonomy—even if it limits sponsorships—a more ethical approach than stealth marketing, Leung and colleagues (2022) demonstrated that it is also an important indicator of influencer marketing effectiveness: “The extent to which they share self-created (vs. other-created) content offers a unique characteristic for consideration. We find that influencers who post more original content are more effective senders because they increase engagement elasticity” (p. 111). The converse is also true: Audiences will penalize influencers and brands who violate the maxim of autonomy. Pradhan and colleagues (2023) stated, “We apply the theory of moral responsibility to argue that when members of Gen Z perceive a brand to have exerted a high degree of creative control over an influencer’s content, they will consider both the brand and the influencer to be guilty of a moral transgression—that is, to have violated the ethics of both autonomy and community” (p. 31).
Influencer marketing research points to other ways in which tightly controlling influencer content reduces effectiveness, in addition to being unethical. Leung and colleagues (2022) noted that when influencers post very positive content about a brand, audience’s question their authenticity and “instead perceive manipulative intent” (p. 100). This is probably because the influencer is, in fact, manipulating the audience, especially if the post contains affiliate links that the influencer profits from (Ivkovic & Milanov, 2010). The influencer’s recommendation becomes an advertisement, and the audience senses that they are no longer being spoken to as fellow consumers but as possible customers—a means to an end rather than ends unto themselves.
From the marketer’s perspective, the solution to the “problem” of the audience’s correct assumption that they are being manipulated is to mix it up a little: “a blend of positive and negative content can yield the greatest effectiveness” (Leung et al., 2022, p. 111). Further, with an almost humorous level of specificity, “Figure 2, Panel C, indicates that the average firms in our data set overshoot in terms of post positivity; they could increase their influencer marketing effectiveness by 1.9% by instructing influencers to offer some slightly negative content in their posts” (Leung et al., 2022, p. 111). Using data analysis to calibrate the elements of an advertisement’s medium and message for maximum effectiveness (read: profit) is not necessarily unethical in every circumstance, but when the medium is influencer speech, which audiences expect to be noncommercial, it is. Rather than micro-managing influencer content, Hugh and colleagues (2022) offer a simpler solution, which also happens to be more ethical: “For the influencer, being able to express their genuine opinion is critical because content that truly reflects their beliefs, values and interests should assist them in producing creative, inspiring and persuasive content that engages followers” (p. 23).
This suggest that brands, for both practical and ethical reasons, should relinquish control over influencers’ content, as this practice treats both the influencer and the audience as means to the brands’ ends, which is both unethical and ineffective in the long-term. Will influencer content always conform to brands’ preferred mode of commercial speech? Probably not, but if audiences are continually seeking refuge from such commercial speech, this might not be such a bad thing. Pradhan and colleagues (2023) found that brands stand to lose more than influencers for breaches of ethics: “… the results show that Gen Z tend to direct their deep anger towards the brands as well as the influencers when they perceive brands’ behavior as morally transgressive… brands bear the brunt of consumers’ anger, whereas influencers experience a certain amount of reprieve” (p. 44).
Another way that influencer marketing can backfire if not handled ethically is that consumers can easily express their disapproval in ways that tarnish a brand’s carefully crafted image. However, attending to consumers’ concerns rather than silencing or dismissing them (that is, treating them as humans instead of as obstacles to overcome on the way to profit) reduces the danger to brands. Xiao (2023) explained, “Negative comments have a strong influence on consumers. However, if an influencer is actively replying to negative comments, the negative influence is likely to be mitigated” (p. 1). These real conversations between influencers and consumers are likely much more effective in generating goodwill than any PR professional could engineer. In a broader sense, this sort of public, two-way communication forces brands to approach audiences as moral agents to be respected as ends unto themselves, rather than consumers to be manipulated.
Influencer marketing research that juxtaposes audiences’ ethical expectations and effectiveness measures provides an interesting opportunity for marketing professionals to reconsider the lack of emphasis they place on ethics. Drumwright and Murphy (2009) discovered a startling disregard for ethical considerations in marketing education, to wit: “The ambivalence stemmed from concerns that discussions of ethics would have negative effects on students, such as creating doubts about the profession and reducing their ability to succeed” (p. 92). One academic leader stated, “Talking about advertising ethics typically is bashing the profession” (Drumwright and Murphy, p. 93). When one considers how badly audiences react to unethical influencer marketing practices, this bashing might be deserved. If micro-managing the medium and message is ultimately more time-consuming and ineffective than respecting influencers and audiences as ends unto themselves, perhaps marketing professionals should begin incorporating ethical considerations into their training and practice.
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