To Eat the Cake and Have It,too: How Marketers Control Influencer Conduct within a Paradigm of Letting Go

Abstract

The influencer industry follows a paradigm of letting go of control, which assumes that collaborations with influencers will only be effective if marketers grant influencers substantial autonomy in their conduct. However, yielding control constitutes a risk to marketers, because influencers might act differently than desired. This article assumes that, rather than letting go of control, marketers are developing a set of control techniques that are compatible with the paradigm. Grounded in multiple data sources (a secondary analysis of data from two interview studies, ethnographic field data, and member check interviews), it draws on organizational control theory to identify 11 control techniques that marketers employ when collaborating with influencers. In doing so, this article contributes to emerging research on the power structures in the influencer industry. In particular, it adds to the body of knowledge by systematically accounting for marketers’ set of control techniques and identifying hitherto undescribed techniques. On a broader level, this article reconstructs the paradigm of letting go of control in the influencer industry, while simultaneously providing a critical scrutiny of this paradigm.

Let go of control, and let influencers tell your story using their own voices. (Hoos, 2019)

Marketers still want full control. This is understandable—putting your brand in the hands of an influencer is risky. You are exchanging control for authenticity. But in a world full of white noise, authenticity is the only thing that stands out. (Borthwick, 2020)

One major mistake that marketers make is they try to control influencer’s voice. This will hamper the output; (. . .) By giving creative freedom to the influencer, the campaign will be successful. (Thekkethil, 2021)

Influencer marketing has adopted a rhetoric of letting go of control, as these voices from the influencer industry, all quotes from industry publications, illustrate. In fact, this rhetoric has become so dominant in both the field itself and in research that one might feel tempted to speak of a paradigm of letting go. This paradigm derives its legitimacy from an ethics of authenticity that lies at the heart of the influencer industry (Wellman et al., 2020). Only if influencers are allowed to operate largely autonomously, the argument goes, can they produce content that their followers will consider authentic. And only if sponsored messages are authentic, will they be effective.

Historically, however, letting go is not the natural behavior of marketers. On the contrary, control aspirations are an integral part of their self-image. As Mitchell (2001) pointedly puts it: “The traditional brand manager is an inveterate control freak. Instinctively, he wants to control everything about his brand” (p. 260). What Mitchell concludes about brand management has also been observed for other fields of strategic communication, such as corporate communication (Christensen & Christensen, 2018), public relations (Holtzhausen, 2002), or integrated marketing communication (Bruhn & Schnebelen, 2017). This is because letting go of control constitutes a considerable risk to marketers. When granted freedom, influencers might act differently than marketers had desired, and this might result in sub-optimal or even unwanted campaign outcomes. This risk creates a fundamental tension for marketers, because they must balance their own need for control and influencers’ need for autonomous conduct (e.g., Leung et al., 2022; McMullan et al., 2022; Rundin & Colliander, 2021). The paradigm of letting go suggests that these tensions are regularly resolved by minimizing control aspirations and granting substantial freedom to influencers to safeguard authenticity. In contrast, I proceed from the observation that marketers—that is, communication practitioners working in corporations that collaborate with influencers (the clients); and practitioners working, on the behalf of clients, in influencer marketing agencies—are “offenders by conviction” who are not willing to give up their control aspirations. Rather, they seek to develop an influencer-specific set of control techniques that allows them to eat their cake and have it, too—that is, they have created a set of techniques that grants them control while simultaneously yielding persuasion success.

In this article, I explore this set of control techniques in the German influencer industry. In doing so, this work contributes to emerging research on power structures in the influencer industry (Arriagada, 2021; Bishop, 2021; Duffy, 2017; O’Meara, 2019; Stoldt et al., 2019). This article examines these structures by investigating the control mechanisms that interfere with influencers’—publicly propagated and ethically conceded (Borchers & Enke, 2022)—autonomous conduct. In particular, it adds to the body of knowledge by systematically accounting for marketers’ set of control techniques from the perspective of organizational control theory (e.g., Tompkins & Cheney, 1985). On a broader level, this work contributes by reconstructing the paradigm of letting go of control in the influencer industry and providing a critical scrutiny of this paradigm.

The Paradigm of Letting Go of Control

The argument I want to put forward begins with my observation that a paradigm of letting go of control has emerged in the influencer industry. This paradigm is adopted by both marketing practitioners, business commentators, and researchers who study the management of influencer campaigns. The paradigm follows a certain logic that rests on a series of causal interferences that deliver an explanation for why control (the “input” into the process constituted by the causal interferences) harms the effectivity (the “output”) of influencer marketing. I leave it open whether less control actually leads to more effectiveness. It is plausible that it does, not least because the paradigm of letting go has taken hold in the industry. However, my interest lies not in the actual performance of campaigns but in the interpretative patterns of marketers (i.e., the paradigm of letting go as a shared imaginary how influencer marketing becomes effective) and the actions of marketers that result from these patterns (i.e., developing a set of control techniques tailored to influencer campaigns).

In fact, this paradigm is not unique to the influencer industry. The notion that marketers need to rethink their communication management routines in response to the advent of social media emerged in the second half of the 2000s. Observing how the social web afforded consumer empowerment processes, marketing scholars began rethinking marketers’ traditional control-based approaches (e.g., Fournier & Avery, 2011; Mangold & Faulds, 2009; Simmons, 2008). Vividly, Christodoulides (2009) captured the change the field was witnessing in the pictures of marketers as guardians versus hosts of brands. He argued that marketers used to rely on the power asymmetries inherent in traditional media systems to control the flow of information about their companies. The democratization of public communication that came with the web 2.0 made this approach obsolete. Christodoulides concluded: “The brand manager who used to be custodian of the brand has now become a host whose main role is not to control (this is impossible) but to facilitate this sharing” of the brand images that consumers’ create (p. 143). This discourse finds reverberation, at least implicitly, in the influencer industry’s embrace of the letting go argument.

In the following, I reconstruct the paradigm of letting go of control mainly from research literature that investigated the perspectives of marketers on influencer marketing. The reconstruction then serves as the background against which I explore how marketers, despite the talk of letting go, seek to maintain control and simultaneously produce campaign effects.

Reconstructing the Logic of the Letting Go Paradigm

Effectiveness and Persuasion Effects

My reconstruction of the paradigm’s logic starts at its endpoint. Effectiveness—or in more formal terms, return on investment—constitutes the output of the process. Effectiveness is what marketers are essentially interested in when collaborating with influencers. What counts as effectiveness depends on the objectives of the particular campaign. Marketers pursue various objectives when partnering with influencers, such as conversions and sales, branding effects, and customer loyalty (Borchers & Enke, 2021; Childers et al., 2019). Marketers consider influencer marketing to be a particularly effective instrument (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2022).

Authenticity ➤ Persuasion Effects

Moving up along the process model, marketers assume that sponsored influencer posts are only effective if the influencer is authentic (Borchers & Enke, 2021). In this, they follow the general discussion in the field that treats authenticity as a crucial component in successful influencer careers (e.g., Duffy & Hund, 2015; McRae, 2017; Shtern & Hill, 2021) and influencers as “experts in authenticity” (Arriagada, 2021, p. 233). Effects research supports the letting go logic in that it finds evidence for the importance of authenticity in influencer communication (Lee & Johnson, 2022; Pöyry et al., 2019).

Followers readily sanction inauthentic influencers. Such behavior hurts the influencers, in the first place, because it threatens their status as microcelebrities. In more extreme cases, it can even turn into accusations of selling out (Duffy, 2017; McRae, 2017). Sanctions also hit influencer clients, because they threaten persuasion effects and thus the effectiveness of campaigns.

Autonomy ➤ Authenticity

The logic of letting go posits that authenticity follows from influencer autonomy. As marketers interviewed by Santiago and Moreira Castelo (2020) stated, brands need to allow “influencers to have the creative freedom to create the content in an authentic, original and consistent way” (p. 47). Autonomy, however, goes beyond the creative freedom in producing content, to which it is sometimes reduced. Influencers should be free to follow their own rationales when performing all four roles that they serve for marketers: creating content, distributing content, moderating discussions, and curating their public persona (Enke & Borchers, 2019). The general thrust in the literature is that influencers deliver a better—that is, more effective—service to their clients if they enjoy this autonomy. For instance, marketers believe that influencers will find themselves better able to tailor content to their personal brand if they act autonomously (Arriagada, 2021; Haenlein et al., 2020; Leung et al., 2022; McMullan et al., 2022).

The connection between autonomy and authenticity explains why some sponsored posts appear authentic while others do not. Some authors suggested that collaborations between influencers and corporations pose a challenge to influencer autonomy and thus to their authenticity (Arriagada & Bishop, 2021; McRae, 2017; van Driel & Dumitrica, 2021). For instance, van Driel and Dumitrica (2021) point out the inherent conflict that lies at the core of such collaborations: “As soon as influencers write about commercial products, followers can perceive it as a loss of authenticity, accusing the influencer of selling themselves out and of writing for the money rather than for the community” (p. 69). However, it is important to note that, contrary to what van Driel and Dumitrica imply, followers do not per se discount sponsored content as inauthentic (Borchers, 2022; Breves et al., 2021; Sweeney et al., 2022). According to the logic of letting go, the decisive factor that distinguishes authentic from inauthentic endorsements is the level of autonomy that influencers enjoy in their conduct. As long as influencers enjoy sufficient autonomy, they can act authentically even within endorsement settings. In fact, from the marketers’ perspective, it is one of the great strengths of influencer marketing that it overcomes the traditional contradiction between authenticity and commerciality (Borchers & Enke, 2022; Wellman et al., 2020).

Letting Go of Control ➤ Autonomy

According to the letting go paradigm, influencer autonomy is threatened when marketers attempt to control influencer conduct and interfere with their activities. Essentially, this logic imagines control and autonomy as a dichotomy: either the influencer takes a specific decision and thus acts autonomously; or the marketer makes the decision and thus exerts control by instructing the influencer what to do. An increase in marketer control therefore implies that influencers lose autonomy and hence, authenticity. McMullan et al. (2022) encapsulate this insight when they write that “by trying to exert control over the content, marketers can diminish the strength of the endorsement because it raises questions of authenticity in the consumer’s mind” (p. 563).

Comments that marketers need to let go to produce effective influencer campaigns are legion (e.g., Borchers & Enke, 2021; Haenlein et al., 2020; Leung et al., 2022; McMullan et al., 2022; Rundin & Colliander, 2021; Santiago & Moreira Castelo, 2020). For example, Childers et al. (2019), who interviewed practitioners from influencer marketing agencies, concluded: “The professionals acknowledge the need to relinquish control over content creation to the influencer in order to gain one of the primary benefits of influencer marketing—an authentic message that is not as strong when presented by the brand” (p. 269). According to this belief, letting go of control is an important choice that marketers have to make so that their influencer activities will be successful.

Nonetheless, Marketers Expect Control

Letting go of control does not come easy to marketers, because, as banal as it may sound, the consequence of letting go is that they lose control over their communication measures. Control implies that marketers possess the power to direct influencers in their conduct. Letting go thus entails renouncing that power. This act can feel worrisome to marketers, because it shifts the power balance (sensu Elias, 1978) in favor of influencers, who are now enabled to make decisions that determine the success of the campaign. Furthermore, it runs counter to marketers’ expectations that payment—marketers usually pay influencers or compensate them by other measures—puts them into control. For instance, when working with communication agencies to produce a marketing campaign, marketers hold the full decision-making authority (McMullan et al., 2022). The idea of letting go runs counter to such industry practices. Accordingly, as Coco and Eckert (2020) noted, “public relations professionals expected more control over the influencer’s content because it mirrored paying for traditional advertising” (p. 179).

Besides this counterintuitive setup, a general mistrust that marketers harbor toward influencers adds to their uneasiness with letting go. This mistrust has various roots. An important factor is a suspected lack of professionalism among influencers that results in marketers’ perceived difficulties in predicting content quality and compliance with deadlines (Borchers & Enke, 2021; Childers et al., 2019). While many influencers go through a process of professionalization (Duffy, 2017; van Driel & Dumitrica, 2021), the current stream of emerging, often underage influencers entering the industry is a source of ongoing irritation. Another factor is the double-sided loyalty of influencers who are beholden to both their clients and their followers (Borchers & Enke, 2022). Because the status of influencers depends on their followers, they might be inclined to value loyalty to their followers higher than loyalty to their clients. Knowing that their followers appreciate sincere evaluations (Arriagada & Bishop, 2021; Wellman et al., 2020), influencers might be tempted to deliver more balanced accounts of products than marketers are used to from traditional advertising. Indeed, marketers fear that, in conflicting situations, influencers might be tempted to play off the brand to their followers by criticizing it or, in more extreme cases, deliberately trying to harm it (Borchers & Enke, 2021; Davies & Hobbs, 2020). A third factor spurring marketer mistrust is the influencer activities beyond the respective collaborations. On a business-as-usual level, marketers are concerned with brand safety (Bishop, 2021). Brand safety concerns imply that marketers seek media environments that exclude topics or presentation styles they find controversial. In an influencer context, brand safety issues arise when influencers raise such controversial topics or use controversial presentation styles. Marketers also worry that influencer might develop their public persona in a direction of which they do not approve (McMullan et al., 2022). On a crisis level, marketers fear scandal spillover (Kintu & Ben-Slimane, 2020), which occurs when an influencer-triggered crisis affects the brands with which the influencer has collaborated.

The counterintuitive setup and the mistrust explain why letting go poses a challenge to marketers. In fact, practitioners from influencer marketing agencies report that clients, at least some, find it difficult to embrace the letting go paradigm despite the threats to authenticity and, subsequently, effectiveness that come with traditional control aspirations (e.g., Borchers & Enke, 2021; Childers et al., 2019; Haenlein et al., 2020).

Different Modes of Control

The paradigm of letting go of control creates a tension in marketers who feel uncomfortable granting autonomy to influencers (Borchers & Enke, 2021; Leung et al., 2022; McMullan et al., 2022; Rundin & Colliander, 2021; Stoldt et al., 2019). For example, McMullan et al. (2022) address this tension as one “between allowing for influencer creative freedom and ensuring contract specificity, or sticking to the intent of the contract whether written or implied” (p. 562). Similarly, Leung et al. (2022) conclude that “an inherent tension in [influencer marketing] is that it provides firms with the creativity benefits of leveraging influencers’ content, but it also creates content control problems” (p. 238). The paradigm of letting go gives an unequivocal answer for how to reconcile this tension when it treats marketers’ desire for control as an outdated remnant from a pre-influencer world that is no longer viable in a web 2.0+ environment and that therefore should be overcome.

In contrast, I suggest that, despite the letting go paradigm and the rhetoric that comes with it, marketers explore alternative ways to reconcile this tension to maintain both control and effectiveness. In fact, marketing managers can resort to a body of knowledge on how to exercise control less directly. Organizational control theory has investigated how managers attempt to stay in control of work performances. In doing so, it has highlighted that control can take many different shapes that operate without direct personal command structures (e.g., Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Fleming & Sturdy, 2009). In their seminal work on different modes of control, Tompkins and Cheney (1985) distinguished these modes on the basis of their obtrusiveness. While obtrusive modes interfere blatantly with the autonomy of the controlled individual, unobtrusive modes are “understated, indirect, secondary, or even vague or barely noticeable in day-to-day activities” (Styhre & Brorström, 2021, p. 3). Tompkins and Cheney (1985) described four modes of control that they rank on a scale from obtrusive to unobtrusive: simple control, technical control, bureaucratic control, and concertive control. The first three modes originate from Edwards’ (1978) historical work on managers’ control strategies. According to Edwards, simple control is a mode that is based on straightforward commanding and overt supervision. It thus rests on human supervisors who instruct the controlled individual. In succession to simple control, managers established technical control. This mode relies on the inherent demands of the technology to control the individual. Machines and other physical apparatus require specific actions at specific times to function, and these requirements instruct the conduct of the individual. As a next mode of control, managers advanced bureaucratic control. Bureaucratic control uses rules, policies, and regulations as instruments of control. Control is thus relocated in the structure of the organization and becomes impersonal. Tompkins and Cheney added concertive control as a fourth mode of control. They argue that “in the concertive organization, the explicit written rules and regulations are largely replaced by the common understanding of values, objectives, and means of achievement, along with a deep appreciation for the organization’s ‘mission’” (p. 184). This mode of control relies on the identification of the individual with the organization and its values etc.

Two aspects should be noted when investigating control relationships. First, the more unobtrusive modes of control have not made the more obtrusive modes obsolete. Rather, they expanded the toolbox of control techniques that managers have at their disposal, so that, today, all four modes can operate in an organization simultaneously. Accordingly, managers can combine modes of control to pursue their objective. For example, Bullis and Tompkins (1989) demonstrated how managers in the US Forest Service applied both bureaucratic and concertive control techniques to pursue three different objectives, namely, preforming decisions, detecting and discouraging deviations, and developing identification. These objectives fed different mechanisms, yet they all secured managers’ control of work performances. Second, a lower degree of obtrusiveness does not imply that control lessens. Barker (1993) even found concertive control “to draw the iron cage [of rational control] tighter and to constrain the organization’s members more powerfully” (p. 408) than does bureaucratic control, which counts as less obtrusive.

The take-away from organizational control theory for the examination of control in influencer marketing is that marketers have considerable experience with tailoring their control techniques to the expectations of both the controlled individuals and society without necessarily letting the reins out of their hands. Certainly, organizational control theory focusses mainly on the control of organization-internal processes. However, there is no reason why marketers should not apply established control strategies to organization-external actors, such as influencers. Against this background, it becomes apparent that the paradigm of letting go zeros in on the more obtrusive modes of control. It encourages marketers to abandon these modes because it is them that blatantly conflict with influencer autonomy. At the same time, the paradigm remains suspiciously silent on the more unobtrusive modes—modes that might be less obvious to influencers and their followers since they locate control in structures rather than in human supervisors.

To be clear, I do not claim that all marketers in the influencer industry are familiar with organizational control theory. Still, I suggest that marketers have a general, though possibly fuzzy, understanding that their options for conducting the conduct of influencers extend beyond simple control. I therefore take the findings of organizational control theory as a cue to look for less obtrusive approaches in the industry. Accordingly, I suggest that also in the influencer industry, marketers are establishing a set of control techniques that draws on different modes of control. Many of these techniques fly below the radar of influencer audiences and some, possibly, even below the radar of the influencers themselves. Only little is known about these techniques. Evidence in the research literature is confined to a few more formal techniques, specifically creative briefings, approval processes, morality clauses, and brand guidelines (Bakker, 2018; Campbell & Farrell, 2020; Davies & Hobbs, 2020; Haenlein et al., 2020). In addition, Bishop (2021) also highlighted the control function of careful influencer selection through industry classification tools. Despite these insights, I conjecture that our understanding of such control techniques is still severely limited. To close this gap, this study explores marketers’ control techniques and asks:

What techniques do marketers apply to maintain control over influencer conduct in influencer marketing campaigns?

Methods

I conducted this study in Germany. The German influencer industry has witnessed a constant growth throughout the years. While there exist no data on the total volume of investments in influencer marketing, a (non-representative) industry survey showed that the 44% of German companies increased their influencer marketing budgets drastically between 2019 and 2021 (Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft, 2021). The industry also gained significant traction in the eyes of marketers during the COVID-19 pandemic (Informationsdienst des Instituts der deutschen Wirtschaft, 2022). The German influencer industry is thus in line with global trends. This seems true also regarding the paradigm of letting go. German marketers have been reported to call for letting of control (Borchers & Enke, 2021), just like their international colleagues (e.g., Childers et al., 2019 for the United States; Leung et al., 2022 for China; Santiago and Moreira Castelo, 2020 for Portugal). Given that the theme of letting go of control surfaces in many national contexts, I argue that investigating how marketers in Germany attempt to cope with the paradigm can tell us something about the challenges the influencer industry faces also beyond the German context.

I based my examination on three data sources: (1) I conducted a secondary analysis (Mason, 2007) of data gathered in two expert interview studies on the management of influencer campaigns (Borchers & Enke, 2021) and on influencer industry ethics (Borchers & Enke, 2022). In these studies, Nadja Enke and I interviewed influencers and marketers from client organization and influencer agencies in Germany (n = 48). (2) I created ethnographic field notes (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019) in the context of influencer industry events in Germany from 2017 to 2021. In these events, I participated as either an ordinary participant or speaker/discussant/workshop facilitator. The events included three industry conferences, five workshops, and five public discussions. The conferences covered a great variety of topics related to influencer marketing and were mainly attended by influencers and influencer marketing professionals. In four of the workshops, influencers, politicians, journalists, and researchers came together to discuss issues that circled around political engagements by influencers, such as their role in election campaigns and their social responsibilities. A fifth workshop included an ethics training for influencers and marketers. The public discussions were set up either by influencer marketing agencies or by journalists. They brought together influencers, marketing practitioners, and researchers, in two cases, also representatives of political parties and institutions, who discussed a wide range of issues. The main target group of these discussions was either industry professionals or the general public. These events also constituted the context of discovery: It was early during these events that I noticed the discrepancy between the rhetoric of letting go and control aspirations. I then set out to examine this discrepancy in more detail and created field notes during and after the events I attended. (3) In five member check interviews (Creswell & Miller, 2000), I presented preliminary results from the analysis of the data from (1) and (2) to five influencer agency practitioners. Two of these practitioners had also participated in one of the expert interview studies, and three of them I knew from my engagement with the influencer industry. I selected these interview partners purposefully because I had come to know them as hard-headed thinkers who reflect and question the field. Accordingly, I identified them—or rather: interviews with them—as information-rich cases (Patton, 2002, p. 230). This procedure produced new data on the control techniques. Furthermore, I included the member check interviews to safeguard the validity of my analysis. I decided that such a separate procedure would be beneficial to my undertaking, because I based my initial conclusions on a secondary analysis and my own field observations. Drawing on different modes of data collection is a procedure that also other researchers in the field have employed (e.g., Duffy, 2017; Johnson & Woodcock, 2019; Wellman et al., 2020). It has the advantage of allowing to examine the phenomenon of control from different perspectives and thus affords triangulation.

I analyzed data in a process oriented by thematic analysis. The relatively narrow scope of my research interest led to some minor modifications of the analysis procedure described by Braun and Clarke (2006), because the themes were somewhat less complex than in a typical thematic analysis. The analysis procedure was as follows: After refamiliarizing myself with the data from sources (1) and (2), I coded the interview transcripts, using the data-driven strategy of open coding as described by Schreier (2012). The aim of this initial coding was to identify any control techniques that came up in the interviews. I then added the field notes into the process. Because I had created these notes in a goal-oriented way, they already had a clear focus on control techniques. I could thus either assign the techniques they described to a code created during the coding of the interviews or, if no adequate code existed, create a new code. In a next phase, I reviewed the codes to develop themes. As an organizing principle, I used the modes of control introduced in the previous section. By assigning the identified techniques to these modes, I developed four themes.

I used these “raw themes” and the paradigm process model (displayed in Figure 1) as the basis for the member check interviews. Following the work of Creswell and Miller (2000), I asked the interviewed agency practitioners whether the developed themes and categories “make sense, whether they are developed with sufficient evidence, and whether the overall account is realistic and accurate” (p. 127). The interviewees could approve or criticize my analysis and comment on my observations in detail. I also asked if they could add any techniques. I then coded the member check interviews in the same way as the other data, adding new codes if needed. After the coding, I undertook a last revision of my themes and categories to produce the final version of my analysis.

Figure 1.

The logic of the paradigm of letting go of control.

Techniques for Controlling Influencer Conduct

This section presents the control techniques that marketers developed for the conduct of influencer conduct. I sorted these techniques into the four control modes described by Tompkins and Cheney (1985).

Simple Control

The first group of techniques operates on simple control. I sorted techniques into this group if they involve straightforward instructions that leave the influencer little freedom in how the sponsored posts should look like. Essentially, these techniques locate the decision-making in the marketer and thus have the tendency to reduce the influencer to a mere executor of orders. This category includes providing scripts to influencers, taking over the interactions with followers, and approving influencer content.

Scripts

Scripts directly interfere with influencer autonomy because scripts minutely define how influencers should act. Actors in the influencer industry regard scripting posts with caution, exactly because of the high degree of interference. A social media manager company explained: “I don’t believe in predetermining what an influencer should say. Because, honestly, then he is no longer valuable to me. Because he’s no longer authentic if he memorizes something.” Despite this clear discountenance of scripting, some marketers nevertheless expect influencers to follow preset scripts. An agency representative shared his experience:

There are also clients who don’t let [the risks associated with scripting] stop them and try to put it in influencers’ mouths. We’ve already had that. And it works with some influencers. You can really give them impulses as to how they should formulate and express it.

If marketers use scripts, they usually refrain from scripting the complete post, as would be the standard procedure in advertising. For instance, marketers instruct influencers to echo campaign slogans or use specific wordings when discussing the advantages of the endorsed product. On a less intrusive level, marketers stipulate the use of, for example, specific hashtags, mentions, or links.

Interaction Takeover

When influencers endorse brands, their followers post questions about the brands in the comment section. These comments represent a welcomed opportunities for marketers to build relationships with their customers. However, as a client representative explained, some influencers put sponsor-related comments in second place because it generates additional work. A client representative shared her experience with influencers who were less willing to react on questions from their followers on brand-related content: “Some [influencers] refused. There were actually discussions whether to post another feed. [And I thought:] It’s your community, it should be important to you!” For influencers, reacting to sponsor-related comments can feel bothersome, because emotionally, campaign involvement often ends with posting the sponsored post. Questions from the community may also be too detailed for influencers and require them to check with their clients, causing additional coordination costs. An agency representative put forward a solution to this problem. She explained how clients can take over the management of sponsor-related interactions in a campaign and the benefits that come with this approach: The influencer does “not have to answer the questions. And this is how I control the output. And additionally, the influencer isn’t required to talk about a topic that is not necessarily 100 percent his topic.” While influencers might hesitate to pass control of the comment section to a client, they might nevertheless be willing to do so because they appreciate being relieved of this less exciting task.

Approval Processes

In approval processes, influencers present the post that they prepare for a client to the client or their agency. This procedure puts marketers into the position to accept or dismiss the proposals of influencers. Other than scripts and interaction takeovers, approval processes aim at controlling the outcome rather than the behavior. Roughly speaking, approval processes can be sorted into two categories: Influencers either present their idea for how to compose the post before they begin producing it, or they present the completed post before they publish it. In the pre-production scenario, ideas for posts are usually discussed in more general terms. Influencers present the storyline and how they plan to integrate the product, while marketers have room to pitch their ideas. Influencers do not spell out every nuance. Accordingly, storyboards, a common technique in advertising agencies that would allow for more control, are uncommon. In the post-production scenario, marketers evaluate the supposedly final post. In comparison to the pre-production scenario, their agency is more restricted. Agency practitioners emphasize that a post-production approval procedure mainly checks whether the technical details, such as mentions or affiliate links, are correct and whether the influencer has heeded the dos and don’ts (see briefing below). Change requests based on aesthetic or content preferences, for instance, are less accepted at this point. This does not mean that marketers, specifically clients, would not make substantive demands during the post-production approval. However, they should be prepared to meet resistance: influencers defend their autonomy, and agency practitioners are concerned about triggering reactance in disgruntled influencers.

Technical Control

This group includes techniques that use technical control. Admittedly, influencers do not operate machines that could determine what they do. Technical control might therefore appear inapplicable to their case. However, when abstracting technical control to its core, namely that the design of the work environment instructs the actions of the individuals working in this environment, two techniques qualify as technical control: nudging influencers and giving choices to influencers.

Nudging

Nudging is a demanding control technique, because it depends on the possibility of controlling the environment through which influencers move. Influencer events offer this type of highly controlled environment. An agency representative described how she prepared events, for which she had invited 20 influencers for a weekend stay at a hotel. She arrived

one and a half days earlier, to decorate everything. Got up early every morning to prepare everything so that [the influencers] have the experience and the brand is present everywhere. So they couldn’t even use the restrooms without encountering the brand.

However, pure presence is not enough. The product has to be showcased in a way that it becomes “Instagrammable”—that is, visually appealing. Flowers and animals, in particular, are established tools for boosting Instagrammability. This technique is informed by the rationale that influencers depend on a constant flow of new content to run their channels. They will therefore take pictures of an appealingly presented product on their own initiative and without marketers explicitly urging them to do so. At the same time, control over the product presentation during such events ensures that the results will satisfy the client. Influencer trips, a common way of collaborating with travel influencers, provide another controlled environment. Here, the agency that plans the trip has—to varying degrees—the power to decide, for example, which places influencers visit and which people they meet. In this respect, influencer events resemble traditional press trips.

Being confronted with the technique of nudging in a member check interview, an agency representative commented that this technique is less frequent because it requires considerable investment: “This is incredibly costly. If companies do this, they really invest a great deal of money and also really much work.” However, there are also less costly forms of nudging. An agency representative explained how nudging can be used when shipping products to influencers:

If it’s packed nicely, that’s something different than opening a box with a boxcutter. And then you open the lid and there’s the product, ribbons, nicely wrapped, maybe there’s a postcard with a personal message for me, and so maybe I will make a story about how I unpack the box.

Viewed in this elementary form, nudging gains in applicability because marketers can implement it more easily.

Choices for Influencers

Giving influencers the possibility to make choices from a predefined set of options is a more subtle technique that marketers use to control influencer conduct. For example, marketers grant influencers the freedom to decide which products from the sponsoring brand they want to endorse. There are different variants here: influencers may be free to choose from a specific product category, such as all Christmas-themed products; they may select one product out of a set of five or ten suggested products; or they may receive a virtual budget to choose one or more products from such a set (reminiscent of winners in the TV show Wheel of Fortune). Such procedures delegate the finetuning of product-influencer fit to the influencers. They thus ensure that influencers truly approve the product they are endorsing.

A similar mechanism comes into effect when providing influencers with a list of key brand features and letting them decide which features they mention in their content. This often takes the shape of select-two-out-of-five arrangements. This approach ensures that influencers choose the features that are most relevant to their community and those that they can neatly integrate into their storytelling. Still, it does not overload the content creation process by obliging influencers to squeeze too much preset information into the post.

Bureaucratic Control

Bureaucratic control lies at the core of the next group of techniques. I assigned techniques to this group if they aim at creating governmental frameworks for influencer conduct. This third group consists of committing influencers to contracts and providing briefings to influencers.

Contracts

Signing contracts is a traditional control technique. While the influencer industry relied on informal agreements in its early days, the professionalization of the field led to a broader acceptance of contracts as a basis for collaborations. Agency representatives in particular advocate the use of contracts. An agency representative formulated the general belief that stands behind this position: “Always sign a contract. It’s good for everyone.” Marketers usually use contracts to lay down concrete components, such as number of posts, timing, and disclosure issues. Another important function of contracts is to prevent influencers from collaborating with competitors of their sponsor.

Briefings

Actors in the influencer industry often referred to the briefing as the most important technique for controlling influencer conduct. In the briefing, marketers can explain their campaign, their product, and their vision of the collaboration to the influencers. The dos and don’ts form an important part of these briefings, as marketers define what influencer conduct they would (and would not) like to see in campaigns. Providing best case examples is a technique that some marketers use to illustrate their dos. Don’ts include issues such as use of alcohol or offensive language. For certain product categories, such as nutritional supplements, the don’ts may also include legal requirements to prevent influencers from making claims that could be legally challenged.

There are mixed opinions on how tight the briefing should be. While some marketers use the briefing to give detailed instructions, others argue that it should be restricted to the most important points: “You can do a basic briefing that includes the most important things, the absolute no-gos (. . .). But this should not be more than an A4 page and the rest you clarify in the face-to-face talk.” Marketers thus distinguish between a written and an oral briefing that is less official. This distinction is informative, because it shows that the oral tradition from the early days of the field is still alive.

The scope of the briefing mainly depends on the client’s demand for control. However, providing briefings that are too tight might scare off influencers who want to avoid over-controlling clients. Marketers also tailor briefings to the influencers, as an agency practitioner mentioned: “There are influencers who are not that versed. They would need a more detailed briefing. The pros, they don’t need to be taken by the hand so much anymore.” This differentiation implies that professional influencers are influencers whom marketers can expect to comply and whom they willingly grant greater freedom.

Concertive Control

Finally, marketers employ control techniques that rest on concertive control. These techniques are subtle in that they ensure that influencers’ values, objectives, and means of achievement correspond with those of the client. This group includes providing feedback to influencers, establishing long-term relationships with influencers, carefully selecting influencers, and evaluating collaborations.

Feedback

Feedback processes bear some similarities to approval processes, yet, they are less binding and standardized. An agency representative explained that the difference between approval and feedback lies in the degree of interference that influencers perceive:

We do not position it as an approval process. The influencer does not need to get approval. But with this over the shoulder view we try a kind of light guidance of the influencer in the interest of the client. However, this should never be perceived in a way that the influencer feels manipulated or guided, but simply that the influencer gets help from us and advice.

This statement not only demonstrates that marketers know influencers dislike control attempts, but it also indicates that feedback is at times presented in the shape of well-disposed advice. However, the main difference between approval processes and feedback lies in the control modes on which they rest. While approval processes establish a clear hierarchy with the marketers as principal, feedback processes signal influencers how to find a common ground with their clients.

At the same time, some influencers appreciate the guidance that marketers provide. Referring to bigger projects, such as the production of more comprehensive YouTube material, the representative of a state agency explained: “Without me classifying this as an approval, it is simply often the case that [the influencers] with whom we work approach us and ask: Am I on the right track?” Another feedback scenario involves the presence of marketers during content production. Being present during this creative process allows marketers to make suggestions on, for example, shooting locations, perspectives, or emerging storylines. Although feedback procedures, such as counseling and marketer presence, do not constitute the default setting in the industry, they illustrate that coordination procedures exist also at a level below approval processes.

Long-Term Relationships

Establishing long-term relationships with influencers is an approach that has been propagated occasionally to better leverage the potentials of influencer collaborations (Borchers & Enke, 2021; Wolf & Archer, 2018). Yet establishing long-term relationships also constitutes a control technique that brings several advantages to marketers. First, long-term relationships make it possible to become better acquainted with the influencers. Having a clear understanding of their working routines, and also their personality, makes it easier to predict their future conduct. This improves the accuracy of selection processes. Second, long-term relationships enmesh influencers in a web of social consideration, and the mutual respect that follows fosters influencers’ attention to client requests. Marketers feed this process deliberately. For instance, they pay favors to influencers by supporting influencer initiatives, providing technical guidance, or promoting influencers on organization channels. They also pay favors in the form of exclusiveness. The national head of marketing of an international film company provided an example of how brands create reciprocity through exclusivity. During a presentation at an industry conference, he spoke about how the company hosts pre-screenings of films for a handful of selected influencers. One of the purposes that these events serve is to make influencers obliged to the company. The pre-screenings represent unique opportunities for influencers to produce exclusive content for their community and stand out in the competition for audience attention. Because they want to maintain their seat at these screenings, influencers display their willingness to defer to marketers’ suggestions.

Building long-term relationships can also rest on smaller acts. Regular informal meetings over coffee are a way to secure the favor of influencers, while contacting at special occasions is another. For example, an agency representative reported: “On their birthdays and on Christmas, we send things to the [influencers] with whom we have a lot of contact. (. . .) Personal postcards that we all sign, I mean where we really congratulate on the birthday without giving anything monetary.”

Finally, personal acquaintance plays a crucial role in the influencer industry. Marketers use personal acquaintance strategically, as an agency representative explained:

Interviewee:

It is always necessary for us to talk a lot with the [influencers] with whom we collaborate, talk on the phone, but obviously also sit down together in person and talk over things in a way that creates a certain professionalism and commitment.

Interviewer:

What do you mean by commitment?

Interviewee:

Well, between ourselves? Even if it is recorded: Someone I’m emailing is more likely to screw me over than someone I’ve looked in the face.

This statement demonstrates how the influencer industry runs on personal dynamics. These dynamics take effect in collaborations because, as linchpin of their channels, influencers are heavily involved in all steps of the collaboration process.

Influencer Selection

A central technique for establishing control is the careful selection of influencers. Marketers go to great length to determine the fit of influencers in different respects, such as thematic expertise and narrative style, make sure that the hard indicators, such as interaction rates, are adequate, and inquire whether influencers possess the desired qualifications (Bishop, 2021; Borchers & Enke, 2021). While these procedures first and foremost serve the purpose of ensuring optimal campaign performance, they also aim to single out those influencers who will behave in the best interest of the client. Marketers assume that if they are working with compliant influencers, controlling influencer conduct becomes less imperative, because the influencers will do what they are desired to do anyway. Accordingly, marketers repetitively stressed the importance of the selection process, as did this agency practitioner:

You can’t dictate everything to the influencer (. . .). Obviously, you must let go. But beforehand, make sure that you choose the right influencers. That’s one of the most important things in the run-up. What determines the success of a campaign, is the right selection of influencers.

A high degree of control in the preparation of a campaign thus facilitates letting go during the actual collaboration.

Evaluation

Evaluation processes introduce a feedback loop into the selection process. Based on the outcomes of the process, marketers can refine their selection criteria or decide whether to continue the work with specific influencers. Evaluation processes are based either on performance or controllability. Performance-based evaluations refer to key performance indicators, such as sales, interaction rates, and sentiments (Gräve, 2019). In contrast, controllability-based evaluations consider the dynamics of the collaboration. An agency representative explained: “In our reporting, we include an extra category: how the collaboration with the influencer was, what our recommendations are, to continue the collaboration or not, how difficult they were or not difficult, regardless of the performance.” Controllability-based evaluations primarily aim at judging how professionally an influencer works. At the same time, however, they also serve the purpose of determining how willing influencers are to cater to the requests of clients. As such, controllability-based evaluations are a technique to identify—and privilege—compliant influencers.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, I investigated the techniques that marketers employ to control influencer conduct. I identified 11 techniques that can be categorized according to their degree of obtrusiveness. While techniques, such as providing scripts to influencers and approving influencer content severely limit influencer autonomy, other techniques, such as nudging and establishing long-term relationships with influencers are more unobtrusive. Rather than prescribing specific actions for influencers, these techniques build on creating what, in reverberation of Foucault’s (2010) studies of governance, might be called spaces of options. When moving through these spaces, influencers have the autonomy to select the options they favor and thus make decision for themselves. However, these spaces are designed so as to ensure that all possible options further the interests of marketers. Certainly, not all marketers succeed in creating spaces this way. Yet this is the ideal to which marketers aspire, so that, whatever influencers choose to do contributes to achieving the marketer goals. By shifting control away from simple control, marketers exert control even within a paradigm of letting go—and thus, eat the cake and have it, too.

This approach follows the logic of supplementing direct control-and-command settings (Christodoulides, 2009) with more unobtrusive modes of control. This study showed how different modes of control—simple control, technical control, bureaucratic control, and concertive control—exist besides each other in the influencer industry. Drawing on the objectives that Bullis and Tompkins (1989) identified in their study on different modes of control, it is possible to further refine this analysis (see Table 1). Six of the 11 identified techniques aim at preforming decisions, three techniques strive to detect and discourage deviations, whereas only two techniques attempt to develop identification of influencers with their clients. This imbalance can be explained by the status of influencers as external actors. Surely, marketers wish to work with influencers who genuinely identify with their brand, yet the predominance of the “advertising-led model to influencer engagement” (Wolf & Archer, 2018), which relies on short-term collaborations to produce sponsored posts, sets clear limits to developing identification in influencers. While marketers know that building stable relationships with influencers will bring benefits in the long run, many nevertheless rely on a thorough selection process to ensure identification because this technique is better compatible with the advertising-led model. In comparison to developing identification, preforming decisions and detecting and discouraging deviations are objectives that are less demanding. For example, drawing up a contract, conducting a briefing, or giving feedback can become routine processes that function on the one-off basis of the advertising-led model and that possess authority because they are firmly established in collaborations across organizational boundaries in the communication sector and elsewhere.

Table 1.

Set of Marketer Techniques for Controlling Influencer Conduct.

Control objective	Mode of control
	Simple	Technical	Bureaucratic	Concertive
Preforming decisions	− Scripts − Interaction takeover	− Choices for influencers − Nudging	− Contracts − Briefings
Detecting and discouraging deviations	− Approval processes			− Feedback− Evaluation
Developing identification				− Influencer selection− Long-term relationships

Even if some of the control techniques outlined here might fly under the radar of influencers, control is possible only with their tacit complicity. Most influencer business models heavily depend on revenue from product endorsements, and this dependency opens the door for marketer requests. Influencers know that signaling controllability increases their likeliness of winning sponsorships. They also know that it is necessary to accommodate clients’ wishes to establish a successful career (Duffy, 2017). Influencers thus learn to anticipate the expectations of marketers and behave according to these anticipated expectations. Their willingness to give in to marketers’ control attempts can be interpreted in terms of concertive control since it demonstrates how influencers internalize the values, objectives, and means of achievement of the industry. However, this internalization goes beyond the micro-level of the campaign, on which marketers deploy the identified techniques. Instead, it has its source in a shared understanding of the industry’s structures. Concertive control thus operates also within the macro-structure of the field. At the same time, followers expect influencers to be authentic in their presentation of endorsed products (Sweeney et al., 2022). Inauthentic endorsements can easily lead to accusations of selling out (Duffy, 2017; McRae, 2017) and eventually threaten influencers’ microcelebrity status. Influencers thus have a strong incentive to conceal their controllability from followers. Welcoming feedback, following briefings, or submitting to approval processes are procedures that influencers accept because they allow them to actively signal controllability, while granting them at least some freedom in their conduct. This freedom often suffices for influencers to leave their individual imprint on the content and sidestep discussions about selling out. Control techniques that are less instrusive, such as nudging, providing choices, and building long-term relationships, grant influencers even more freedom and are thus less apparent to followers.

Future research should examine how influencers handle the control attempts of marketers. I argued that some of the described techniques might fly under the radar of influencers, while influencers might willingly comply with others. However, studies that specifically adopt the perspective of influencers are needed to further substantiate this analysis. Another path for deepening the analysis lies in looking beyond the influencer industry to add context. For instance, marketers have since long used testimonial advertising (Shtern & Hill, 2021) and thus look back at a history of working with (and controlling) celebrities, consumers “from next door,” and others. Since the emergence of the web 2.0 with its user-generated content, marketers have also faced the challenge of navigating an environment that is shaped by increasingly empowered consumers (Labrecque et al., 2013). Bringing these lines of research to the study of influencer marketing promises to deepen our understanding of marketers’ control techniques. Moreover, such an undertaking holds great potential for broadening our understanding of such issues as the role of intermediaries in the influencer industry or the work identities of the actors involved (Arriagada, 2021).