What Does the TikTok Trend of De-influencing Mean for Your Brand?

success.com:

is a popular profession and a coveted income stream for brands—influencer recommendations can skyrocket a product’s popularity, especially in the beauty and wellness spaces.

And if influencing is all about recommending products to your followers, de-influencing takes that idea and flips it on its head.“It’s a bunch of influencers who, instead of promoting products, are speaking negatively, in many instances, about things that didn’t work for them,” explains Jessy Grossman, founder and CEO of Women in Influencer Marketing. “Just being really candid and honest and focusing on the reality that a lot of products aren’t so great.”When de-influencing took off, it spread for the same reasons most TikTok trends do: Creators want to jump on the latest content trends to catch the wave of whatever the app’s mercurial algorithm chooses to favor at any given moment. “It creates a lot of buzz and engagement, which a lot of influencers are struggling with, because the algorithms can be unpredictable,” Grossman explains. “Everyone’s trying to get more views and get more followers.”Grossman says we’re seeing a cultural shift in the way influencers (and their followers) want to talk about (and hear about) brands and products.For a long time, every new cosmetic brand and kitchen gadget seemed to garner the same reaction from influencers and influencing hopefuls who’d use it on camera and respond with wide eyes, audible gasps and some version of, “Oh, my God, you guys…”Grossman thinks de-influencing is probably a reaction to that recommendation fatigue.

She gets tired of the endless parade of positive content on her feed—if everyone says that everything is good, you can’t possibly tell one way or another what’s actually worth spending your.