Resist influence: Think twice being adopting the HUL influencer playbook for online market outreach

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.That Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) has a network of 300,000 ‘influencers’ at work for its marketing department, as declared in April by Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez, has quickly become a PowerPoint talisman. In a world where entire industries sometimes change direction through choreography rather than conviction, that’s an evocative figure. Indian marketing has always had a weakness for the large gesture.

When a major FMCG company moves, others often do not study the move so much as receive it like scripture. Some of this is rational. Companies of that scale have data, muscle and consumer intimacy that few can match.

But some of it is plain mimicry.Economists call one version of this an informational cascade: rational actors suspend private judgement and follow visible behaviour until imitation starts masquerading as consensus. It looks like strategy. Often, it is just organized deference made to look thoughtful by PowerPoint.While 300,000 online content creators who can hawk products may make sense for a company with over 50 brands and proprietary AI systems for network management, we ought to ask if this model is replicable by others.

History is littered with strategies that looked inevitable but proved expensive.Consider India’s ‘influencer economy.’ Estimates by GroupM, Dentsu and Statista place it at ₹9,000–10,500 crore. Millions of creators have got into the act of shaping purchase decisions. What began as a experiment has become de rigueur.

And yet much of it still runs with cheerful informality. Deal pricing is opaque, disclosures are patchy and fraud is endemic. George Akerlof had a phrase for markets where quality is hard to observe: lemons.