The premise is simple: Harness the organic influence customers and consumers have on each other in a more strategic, thoughtful way, and you’ll stimulate behaviour change that drives growth for your brand. Yet for many marketers and agencies, rallying advocacy to the brand cause remains a bolt-on, disconnected job.

Too many are led by misconceptions influencers only exist on Insta or TikTok, or that reviews and feedback can’t be measured in the same bucket as paid media. Specialist in-house and agency teams boasting social platform or influencer marketing expertise who can’t see the through line to what the digital team is doing with customer feedback don’t help either.

A new advisory firm, Kindred Nation, is working to change all that. The agency’s ambition is to help brands, experts, partners and specialists unite to build organic marketing and communication opportunities that reshape marketing’s impact.  

“When you engage the right people and speak to them in a way that makes them feel seen or provides that spark, you create behaviour change,” says Kindred Nation CEO Katie Palmer-Rose, an expert in the influencer marketing space. She believes the dam hasn’t yet been broken by brands because many fail to see ‘influence’ as a strategy in and of itself.

“People’s world of social proof, the world of advocacy, the moments they get stopped in their tracks and the pebble in the stream changes their mind or behaviour isn’t just social. We are whole human beings. If you are able to plan all of those spaces outside of social, that’s where you have a lot more impact in the organic space.”

Adding complexity is fragmentation not just of media, but how people connect to each other across all different platforms, sub platforms and as audiences.

“It’s just impossible for one agency or one business to have the expertise to authentically reach consumers exactly where they are every time,” Palmer-Rose says. “We see brands with bits and pieces of organic built into their ecosystems, but it’s very difficult to create a holistic strategy that would make an organic marketing program work.”

That’s where Kindred Nation comes into it. “When you connect a group of experts, partners and specialists around a universal idea of being authentic and working with consumers in a really sustained, positive way, you can create amazing results in terms of behaviour change and growth for brands. That’s our mission.”
 

Shifting focus from efficiency to efficacy

The need for marketers to find a more effective way of engaging consumers is very real. No one is in any doubt scrutiny of marketing budgets has become the CFO’s favourite past time, but optimising will only get you so far.  While many marketers work to find efficiency, they’re dropping the ball on efficacy.

“We’re at a point in time where marketers are being asked really difficult questions. They're not being asked about efficiency anymore, because efficiency was the last decade. Effectiveness is now of much more interest to boards, markets and what companies are expected to be able to understand,” says Henry Tajer, Kindred Nation Non-executive Director/investor.

“While the traditional paid side of marketing is being looked at with a fine-tooth comb to find efficiencies by identifying ineffective areas – I would hazard a guess a lot of market mix modelling and analytics is around what companies can save, or stop doing without any penalty – authentic, real people being deployed and understood as part of your marketing channel is going to highlight efficacy. That will create the right measures for the right companies, depending on what they're looking to do.

“Unlike paid media, which is judged on a CPM basis or how much it costs to buy an audience, the measure of organic marketing is what it costs to make an audience do something as opposed to reaching them. It's a higher order measure closer to the actual outcome and real behaviour of consumers.”
 

The leap from loyalty buyers to loyal sellers

Kindred identifies two sides to influence. One is the more traditional view of understanding an audience, who they are, where they are and how they’re connecting to each other. The second is mobilising the connections brands already have: In other words, your existing customer base.

Palmer-Rose compares it to switching your thinking from seeing customers as people who buy goods and services from a brand, to helping sell those goods and services to others.

“Loyalty is sticking around and the customer repeating purchase. But what if loyalty was extended to advocacy?” Palmer-Rose asks. “We think that is going to uncover some really interesting opportunities for brands. Take B2C brands where there has been a big investment in the customer base – telcos, utilities, airlines, beauty product manufacturers and products that have been born through social platforms. They tout great NPS [Net Promoter Scores] and loyalty, but all they’re doing is measuring it.

“The next stage for NPS is understanding what those positive promoters are about, who you can engage with, who would potentially be prepared to become advocates, resellers and advisors, and how do we enhance our relationships by creating meaningful incentives?”

Such efficacy becomes a whole new sales channel. “Think about the whole review economy: Reviews are offered – they’re a gift from your customer in many ways. That type of currency and marketing is what we’re talking about in terms of understanding your base and how we’ll work with clients,” Palmer-Rose continues.

Customer lifecycle thinking is getting marketers closer to a new way of delivering impact that’s more audience centric. According to Tajer, where it’s coming unstuck currently is measuring advocacy. He suggests the 40-odd per cent representing a brand’s base sales are buried in the current construct of market mix modelling right now and not leveraged as a cohort brands could actively do something with.

“As we start to measure influence in different ways, we’ll be able to unpick advocacy out of the base. Then people will realise advocacy as a standalone measure is a huge chunk of that base,” Tajer says. “A brand is only an accumulation of what people believe it is. Your people make the brand.”

It feels obvious brands should be doing more to connect into organic, authentic conversations. Report after report indicates the steadily growing power of authentic engagement and consumers wanting to hear from ‘people like me’.

Palmer-Rose describes what Kindred wants to inspire as an “organic epiphany”. “Once you start seeing this in action, you think ah, this is working and I can hold it,” she says. Take sampling – one of the oldest marketing tactics in the book – as an example.  

 “Sampling right now is wildly wasted. Not only can we build more efficacy into that but connect it to a bigger organic program. Say the people who sampled your product have a little card with a QR code and that takes them on to an ecommerce site, where there’s reviews that have been generated and they start to see pieces of content people like them have created. All those pieces coming together amplify that one impact of sampling tenfold.”
 

Collaborating, not competing for marketing impact

For the Kindred team, competitive silos are another barrier to tapping influence more strategically. So the agency is looking to hook up with the likes of Mamamia, influencer talent agencies and marketing specialists such as Hoozu, Hypetap and Social Soup to build education and awareness of the power of organic marketing.

“Our goal is to do this for the industry by being open source about influence. If another agency has a specialty and they’re really good at that, we want to have an open approach so we can work together to drive more powerful results for clients,” Palmer-Rose says.  

Measurement is another hurdle to be overcome, and Tajer and Palmer-Rose are in no doubt about the importance of building out frameworks that better capture organic marketing’s impact. The pair agree a lack of hard metrics around influencer marketing have limited significant, longer-term investment.

“We will be able to pull this through from paid to organic and how you achieve reach or engagement, looking at all of those different organic investments,” Palmer-Rose says. “Our role is to synthesise that information and be able to prove that return on investment.”

Tajer goes a step further, arguing not just that the marketing funnel no longer exists, but that current linear and channel-based attribution models fail to account for real people connections feeding into every aspect of the customer lifecycle.

“If you deploy real people and deploy actions in an advocacy or influence-based approach, whether that’s a macro or micro influencer, a customer review, content or grassroots engagement, what it really does is help a company understand what the real shape of that funnel is for them,” Tajer says. “Is it linear? Circular? Does it even exist? Or is it an ecosystem?

“Our ability to measure advocacy and organic is going to really expand our understanding of effectiveness compared to what the market mix model is, which really only measures social cuts and pings. These are not really measuring real people because they haven’t hasn’t been structured in that way yet. But that’s something we believe is coming.”

Kindred wants to become the custodian of organic marketing with brands and agencies alike. In some cases, that may mean taking the lead role on strategy; in others, it’ll play a supportive role by sitting down with a brand or agency’s existing partners and supplementing, complementing or enhancing strategies through organic channels.

“Our real point of difference is helping hold this organic ecosystem cohesively, leveraging the best partners, so your busy marketer or agency doesn’t have to have 15 different conversations with all these people to build this organic world,” Palmer-Rose says. “In some cases, the strategy becomes the lead and in others, organic can become a key part of what is done on the paid side because it’s really authentic and may lend itself to a brand.”

“What we try to do is find the centre of gravity, the core platform, idea or human insight everyone is working towards, then extend that,” Palmer-Rose adds. “It’s about making it seamless and frictionless as opposed to what is currently happening, which is paid stuff and all the creative and media, and a little bit of money left over for advocacy and influencer activity to see what brands can get from it. It’s bolt on, disjointed, or not sequenced in the right way.

“We want to have a dialogue with CMOs and agencies and work through a process of redefining and re-evaluating the tole of influence and advocacy.”