The Influence of Instagram, the Marketing Megalodon
BY Ashley Morales
In 2010, a new social media platform was born. It was a visually focused app, unlike text-based Twitter, and more modern than Facebook. The app was called Instagram. It started out innocently enough, merely a place to share fun pictures of one’s life accompanied by short, quirky, or descriptive captions. However, as the app’s popularity has grown, it has fallen prey to the American capitalist machine, becoming less about sharing with friends and more about selling products and receiving sponsorships. Instagram has become a major advertising platform, a vessel for sponsored content, and a creator of “influencers” who push certain products onto their millions of followers. Instagram assists in the commodification of beauty and adds to the consumerism of America through influencers such as Kylie Jenner. In what follows, I outline the prominent role that Instagram plays in the lives of its users and analyze through the lens of media theory the increasingly commercial and manipulative relationship between the app and its users.
Kylie Jenner, one of the youngest members of the Kardashian-Jenner empire, is one of the most powerful people on Instagram. Kylie has surpassed all members except Kim in her Instagram following with 152 million followers. While she technically got her start on her sisters’ reality show, she gained popularity through Instagram. Her notability stemmed from her physical transformation through plastic surgery, specifically her lip augmentation, and she became a standard of beauty for women across the country. She capitalized off of this social media success by launching a line of beauty products featuring “lip kits” and a host of other beauty products following the success of her initial product. Instagram popularity solidified Jenner’s influential status, with the help of her family name.
Instagram and Kylie Jenner effectively advertise to their followers because of their symbolic power. Symbolic power, as defined by John B. Thompson in Media and Modernity, is based in the production, transmission, and reception of symbols, or the information around us and the way we make sense of it. We all have access to symbolic power because we all have access to symbolism. However, the degrees vary because institutions have more means of controlling symbolic power through control of the resources that we draw from, namely the medium through which information is communicated. These mediums include the pathways of transmission and the prominence, power, and esteem that some institutions or platforms have. This is called “symbolic capital” (Thompson 16). Institutions hold more power than individuals alone, and Instagram’s symbolic power comes from its access to the transmission of images and information, as well as its recognition as a brand that establishes its credibility for the users. Instagram has become a massive powerhouse of influence. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2018, 71% of 18-24-year-olds manage at least one account (Anderson and Smith). Jenner’s symbolic power comes from her control of the transmission of information and advertisement to her followers. Her feed is a mixture of promotional posts for her own brand, scattered mirror selfies, and a majority of professionally taken photos showcasing the face or body. It also brings her influence and prominence as an icon within the larger, culturally admired and well-known brand of the Kardashians as a whole, positioning her as a “credible” source in this context.
In addition to the symbolic, economic power stems from human productive activity and attaching a value to something based on its usage (Thompson 16). Jenner’s economic power comes from the commodification of her content, the money that she makes through the upkeep of her brand and the labor of her hair, makeup, and wardrobe teams behind the scenes of each post. Especially since its 2012 acquisition by Facebook, Instagram wields considerable economic power due to the amount of money it garners as a platform through sponsored content and usage. Throughout the years, there has been an influx of sponsored content on everyone’s Instagram feed, as this is largely how the brand makes money. On my personal feed, every sixth picture is a sponsored post. The app’s algorithm takes the information available about me, such as my age, gender, race, and information about my purchasing habits from third party sources, and compiles ads on my feed tailored to me in the hopes that I will purchase something on the app and by doing so provide capitol to Instagram.
However, Instagram’s own sponsored posts are not the only reason people use the app. People want to connect with their friends, family, fans, and keep up with their favorite influencers. Influencers are beauty or lifestyle idols who influence their followers by utilizing the respect they have gained to recommend their opinions. They are people who keep their hundreds of thousands or millions of followers checking in on the app to see their new content. These are usually beauty gurus who post makeup tips or tutorials, or lifestyle bloggers who might occasionally post “life hacks,” or just live organized, aesthetically pleasing lives full of travel and comfort, which people follow as a sort of aspiration for themselves. Kylie Jenner could be considered a hybrid of the two, living a lavish life while being considered traditionally pretty (thanks in part to extensive plastic surgery) and serving as inspiration for her followers to imitate.
Influencers are aptly named, as they have influence over the public, setting trends and recommending products. They are celebrities in a less traditional sense, with their fame mainly relegated to their presence online. Their online presence is also securely situated in adoration (Djafarova and Rushworth 2). The power they hold is due to the trust that their followers have in their opinions. Influencers affect the public through the “limited effects model” from Kevin Williams’ Understanding Media Theory. This is the idea that there is a mediator, or opinion leader, between the public and the media, and that we are more affected by the influence of said opinion leaders than by the media itself. Opinion leaders are trusted individuals who pay attention to and use the media and for Instagram, influencers take on this role. For example, when Jenner unfollowed now ex-best-friend Jordyn Woods after a fight, many of her followers did the same in support of their opinion leader telling them that she was no longer associating with this person. Usually, opinion leaders reinforce pre-existing beliefs, or in this case, possibly give followers an opinion on a topic based on that of their leader if they were not aware of the issue prior.
Influencers not only have sway over trends and the ideas of the public but also the purchasing behavior of their followers. They make money by partnering with brands and producing sponsored content in the form of Instagram posts or stories advertising a product or service. They can make hundreds of thousands of dollars through partnerships and are paid up to thousands of dollars per promotional post (Barker). For example, a plethora of influencers, mainly fitness influencers or models, advertise weight loss teas or supplements as a “beauty secret” for their followers and provide discount codes or affiliate links (links that, when used, give the influencer a share of the profit made off the product). Followers then buy the product because they trust the opinion of their influencer, who then makes money and the brand gets more sales, which is all facilitated by Instagram.
Instagram has led to a more personal approach to advertising that still accomplishes the goal of the brand, while the consumer has more trust in the advertiser. Influencers are perceived as even more credible and authentic than celebrities because they either originated or gained notability on the platform, and their fame is mostly limited. Jenner’s promotion of certain products, more recently her own beauty and skincare lines but also brands such as Sugar Bear Hair and Teami Blends, lend credibility to said brands and products. This is because brands with celebrity endorsers are seen as trustworthy mainly because of their association with said celebrity, and “researchers argue that information is more credible when delivered by a product reviewer/blogger” (Djafarova and Rushworth 3). It has been found that the promotional posts of influencers for products have been more successful marketing tools than traditional advertisements, even though the quality of the content is lower (Solokova and Kefi 2).
The trust in influencers stems from the idea of parasocial interaction, which “defines the relationship between a spectator and a performer . . . with an illusion of intimacy. . . . Such a relationship is self-established and the other person could be unaware of the relationship and influence it” (Solokova and Kefi 3). Consumer behavior is related to parasocial interaction, as well as low self-esteem caused by this unequal relationship with influencers (Solokova and Kefi 3). Influencers and their sponsors capitalize on the insecurities of followers to sell products because of admiration for the influencer. If a regular girl wants to look like Kylie Jenner, and Jenner is promoting Kylie Skin and Sugar Bear Hair as part of her beauty routine, the follower that trusts her is more likely to buy the products. The parasocial interaction of followers constantly seeing and liking Jenner’s posts and the one-directional relationship built fuel the consumer habits of followers, as well as commodify Jenner’s physical qualities and reduce them to products that people can buy in their attempts to replicate her appearance.
The trust that followers have in influencers is partially unjustified, as few things are genuine on influencer pages, especially the more popular ones. The visual nature of Instagram and the performances of influencers contribute to the marketability of products. Visual mediums such as television, and by extension social media, follow certain sets of rules. As Neil Postman discusses in “The Age of Show Business,” television is a medium to entertain its audience visually, with everything being a spectacle rather than providing careful contemplation or analysis. Postman claims that thinking does not do well on television, and that audiences tune in for the theatricality that the medium provides. The same is true with Instagram. The most popular influencers put out content meant to entertain rather than make their audience think. They also almost always use photo editing effects and filters to appear more visually appealing to their audience. Jenner has been known to photoshop her body in photos and then advertise the brand Teami Blends’ detox program as a beauty secret as to how she looks the way that she does. In reality, what the follower sees in her pictures may not even be real. Even in un-photoshopped posts she is carefully posed and being photographed from a specific angle to grab the attention of her followers. With almost every photo being a photo of her or her products, she utilizes the visual component of the medium to market herself or her sponsors.
Through Instagram’s own sponsored content and that of influencers on the app, Instagram has become a major marketing company that is more focused on selling products than allowing users to share experiences. Influencers have capitalized off of this model, and they fill their own pages with careful branding and sponsored content. Followers then purchase products because there is a perceived level of credibility to the supposedly self-made influencer and a trust due to a perceived relationship between the online personality and the follower. Instagram started as a simple, fun photo sharing app but has been consumed by American capitalism. If users call for a return back to its roots and engage less with influencers and advertisements, it could slow the capitalist trajectory of the app. Instagram’s main source of profit is its users, so we have a voice in what we want to see and together we can change the direction of the content valued on the app.
Works Cited
Anderson, Monica, and Aaron Smith. “Social Media Use in 2018.” Pew Research Center, 1 Mar. 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/.
Barker, Shane. “How to Make Money Off Your Instagram Account.” Forbes, 15 Nov. 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/impactpartners/2019/11/15/eyes-on-the-prize-stay-on-track-for-retirement/#6b20a9bc727c.
Djafarova, Elmira, Chloe Rushworth. “Exploring the credibility of online celebrities’ Instagram profiles in influencing the purchase decisions of young female users.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 68, no. 1-7, Mar 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.11.009.
Postman, Neil. “The Age of Show Business.” Amusing Ourselves to Death, Penguin Books, 2006, 83-98.
Sokolova, K., and H. Kefi. “Instagram and YouTube Bloggers Promote It, Why Should I Buy? How Credibility and Parasocial Interaction Influence Purchase Intentions.” Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, vol. 53, Mar. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2019.01.011. Accessed 4 Dec. 2020.
Thompson, John B. “Communication and Social Context.” The Media and Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1995, 10-43.
Williams, Kevin. “Effects, What Effects? Power and Influence of the Media.” Understanding Media Theory, Arnold Publishers, 2015, 168-89.