A colleague discussed how she had seen a textbook with C2C (consumer-to-consumer) marketing, to which I gave the example of influencers. However, the correct definition is all consumers who might market to other consumers, and it’s not just online: it could include traditional word-of mouth. It could also include gathering reviews from consumers through sending them product, and having those reviews market to others.
But there are categories of C2C that blur with influencer tactics on social media, including brand ambassador programmes.
They can fall into the same trap of inauthenticity that this magazine warned about in 2018—at a time when others were only catching on to the first, positive phase of influencer marketing.
These are phenomena that have affected children, who have spied beauty-routine content online and have, in some cases with harmful consequences, tried anti-ageing products.
AHAs and retinol aren’t for young skin; cleansers, moisturizers, and sunscreens are all that are really needed.
This has coincided with what Jody Miller recently pointed out with the cast of Love Island (above), some of whom look older than they really are. Ironically this is because of rejuvenating procedures—those that older people usually undergo.
Other dangers lurking in the fashion and beauty sphere online include “AI” content, whether writing or imagery. We suspect people will tire of the latter, especially the same-again poses and figures of “AI” models that fulfil some sort of straight male fantasy. Lucire has already covered one, eliciting unimpressed reader responses.
There’s no place for “AI” writing, either, especially as people gain more experience detecting it. Over most of 2024, I have been fighting disinformation surrounding my name, which I covered extensively on my blog, and hinted at once in Lucire.
A lot of the stories read the same, probably optimized through programs like Semrush, which are designed to massage content to make it more search engine-friendly.
We do not believe in such approaches, because the joy in reading comes from both information and a writer’s technique.
The search engine companies, if they are to retain their relevance—though the biggest ones are doing their best to render their products irrelevant—need to understand they make tools for humans, and adapt to us, rather than expect us to adapt to them.
And if their claims about their technological capabilities are true—though we have every reason to disbelieve them—then they should be able to weed out “AI”-written content.
Sooner or later, everyone is going to get caught up in “AI”-generated disinformation on themselves or issues they care about.
And as this drivel is hoovered up and served back to us through search engines that have a financial motive for giving us junk, making us wade through useless results before discovering the answer, it’s a greater threat to media.
Even if we become experts at detecting it, it crowds out legitimate work, making that harder to find. In which case we, the media, need to work far harder in trying to get you to recall our brands, in a world where search engines and corporate social media cannot be trusted.
I said elsewhere that the fact we have print editions might lend itself to legitimacy—and a small social media following might even be a plus, to show that one was never lured in to websites that have proprietors with fascist and genocidal leanings.
The 1990s might be instructive: a time before decent search engines, we relied on human-edited directories and link lists to find the best places to frequent. We asked people to bookmark their favourites. One of the earliest darlings of the World Wide Web—Yahoo!—was human-curated, beginning as a fine example of C2C marketing. We may have to do this again, and hopefully we can figure out who to trust. Surely the most worthy, those we flock to, cannot be as bad as the present’s Big Tech gatekeepers.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.