TAKUMI TRENDS LETTER #24 📈
Welcome to the TAKUMI insights subscription 📊.
If you’re looking for the inside scoop on influencer marketing 📱, social media updates ⚙️, creator culture 🤳, and Gen Z insights 📈, then look no further. TAKUMI’s insights team is curating the most impactful industry news and weekly developments right here 👇.
The Power of the TikTok Holiday Gift Guide | 15th Nov 2021
“According to a 2020 TikTok survey, 80% of users who bought something on Black Friday said the purchase was motivated or inspired by TikTok, and 40% said they bought a specific product they saw on TikTok.”
TAKEAWAY 🔥: By now you've probably heard the words 'TikTok made me buy it' more times than you can count 👀. The platform is brimming with both paid and organic content, highlighting products that users have stumbled across and fallen in love with, using TikTok as a sort of product soapbox. According to our 2020 Whitepaper research, a quarter of 25-34 year olds said they’re likely to trust a TikTok influencer’s recommendation over a friend’s, highlighting the power of TikTok as a funnel for product discovery.
🎄 It's no wonder that 'the #christmaswishlist2021 hashtag on TikTok has been viewed more than 34 million times'. The good news is, it's not just brands with a huge digital presence that can benefit- if a product is strong, you can bet a creator on TikTok will be talking about it 🎁. Nevertheless, if a brand is already on consumer radar, then they are better placed to reel in organic recommendations.
Has your brand featured on any wish lists this year?
Instagram is offering huge bonuses for posting on Reels, its TikTok clone | 11th Nov 2021
“Instagram also announced the Reels Surprise bonus program this week, which will reward up to 150 U.S.-based creators per week with up to $10,000 for a particularly inspiring, entertaining reel.”
TAKEAWAY 🔥: Earlier this year, Instagram announced that it would be giving out $1billion to creators through 2022, in the form of incentive programmes such as Reels Bonuses. The latest initiative to be announced is the Reels Surprise bonus, which will reward 150 US based creators each week with up to $10k for a Reel 💸. Instagram has said that creators don't need to apply, but instead they simply need to keep posting their most entertaining Reels- an ambiguity which is typical of Instagram. However, this vagueness and the element of 'surprise' should certainly incentivise creators to remain consistent with posting engaging and original content, so as not to miss out. If this wasn't enough to steer talent away from other platforms- and encourage brands to up their ad spend on the ‘gram- Instagram deflates watermarked content, which means creators will be at a disadvantage if they repurpose TikTok videos onto Reels⛔️.
YouTube Outlines Plans to Bring Live-Stream Shopping to All Users | 15th Nov 2021
‘‘YouTube’s looking to build in more functionality and interactive capacity to improve the live-stream buying experience, with a view, eventually, to enabling all users to create their own shopping streams.”
TAKEAWAY 🔥: Live-stream shopping takes eCommerce to a new level, allowing brands to interact with their customers while cultivating an immersive experience for potential shoppers 📲. They're all the rage at the moment, and are an incredible way of leveraging creators to help brands reach niche audiences. Creator-led campaigns and organic product recommendations are already commonplace on YouTube, and live-streams are a natural extension of the kind of content that users already love to watch. YouTube's plans to roll-out live-stream availability to all users, coupled with incentives for creators, is a hugely exciting prospect for brands that want an accessible way to jump into the live-shopping space, and broaden their digital presence and product discoverability 🛒.
Gen Z Doesn’t Trust Big Business | 12th Nov 2021
‘‘Gen Z is more likely to respond favorably to advertising and marketing that shows real customers representing diverse audiences—and to identify with content that’s realistic and doesn’t appear overly polished (Salesforce). “
TAKEAWAY 🔥: This eMarketer dive into Gen Z focuses on sentiments towards businesses and how they handle consumer data. Apple's privacy update earlier this year shed a new light on how brands leverage personal data, particularly with respect to personalised and targeted ads 🔒. The statistics shown here reveal that Gen Z is hugely apprehensive when it comes to personalised ads, because they allude to intrusion into their privacy: "they are less likely than older generations to feel comfortable seeing ads that have been personalised for them based on personal data that had been collected (W2O)".
We know that Gen Z are an incredibly proactive and passionate demographic, who prioritise authenticity and whose purchase decisions are driven by values. For brands wanting to reach this audience, they must think carefully about how they are doing so just as much as where 📲. This demographic trust creators and their recommendations, so utilising influencer marketing is not only effective for engaging Gen Z in the right places, but in an organic and authentic way that builds trust without relying on personal data 🌱.
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