Why managing influencers, creators, and founders requires empathy, strategy, and systems
As digital marketers, we’ve long internalised frameworks for selling: the 7Ps, segmentation matrices, SKU logic, and customer journeys. But in today’s influencer-led economy, we’re marketing something far more complex than consumer goods. We’re marketing people. And with that comes a unique tension: how do you apply commercial logic to something as dynamic, unpredictable, and deeply personal as a human being?
From celebrities and micro-influencers to founders with personal brands, our product is no longer just a thing. It’s a living, feeling individual. And yet, performance expectations remain brutal. Miss a post, lose followers. Upload a mediocre video, trigger mass unfollows. Share a thought that’s too raw or too bland, and risk backlash or irrelevance.
So what does it truly mean to manage a person as a product? How do we build systems that respect both performance goals and the volatility of human emotion? And how do we as digital marketers survive the pressure to quantify, optimise, and deliver KPIs off people who can’t be version-controlled?
Let’s dive in.
The Person as SKU: Managing Identity as Inventory
In retail, every product has an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), a unique identifier used to track inventory. In digital marketing, SKUs have a surprising parallel. Each piece of content tied to a person, be a blog, the morning routine reel, the podcast quote, the post-run selfie, these are micro-SKUs in their content shelf.
When you’re marketing a person, your inventory isn’t made up of shirts or cosmetics, it’s made up of moods, soundbites, moments, aesthetics, and lived experiences. Each one needs packaging, promotion, and timing. And just like physical products, poor inventory management leads to loss: of reach, of reputation, of relevance.
As marketers, we try to ‘stock’ the content calendar with high-converting SKUs:
- Motivational clips
- Behind-the-scenes snippets
- Vulnerability posts
- Strong call-to-action reels
But unlike physical goods, our warehouse is a person’s life, and some weeks, the shelves are empty.
The 7Ps Framework for Personal Brands
When we manage a person-brand, the classical 7Ps of marketing take on new layers of meaning:
- Product: The individual and what they symbolise. Are they aspirational? Relatable? Authoritative?
- Price: The cost of following them, emotionally, politically, and temporally. Are they constantly selling? Do they drain or enrich the feed?
- Place: Which platforms they live on, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, and how content is adapted for each. Do they have their website?
- Promotion: Content, collaborations, captions, media features. How are they “sold” to the audience? Do they update us with insightful blogs?
- People: Community and reference groups. Who engages? Who imitates? Who advocates?
- Process: Content creation pipelines, posting cadences, approval flows.
- Physical Evidence: Website, bios, highlights, interviews, or any tangible proof of who they claim to be.
Each “P” is a decision point. And when one breaks, say, inconsistent posting (process) or audience backlash (price), the brand falters.
The Unforgiving Math of Audience Churn
Here’s a hard truth: the higher the follower count, the steeper the consequences.
If a personal account with 1,000 followers posts a bad video, maybe they lose 10 followers. But if an influencer with 500,000 followers uploads a poorly edited or “off-brand” reel, they may lose thousands overnight. The platform amplifies loss at scale.
For example, a celebrity chef, a once-loved food content creator. One wrong recipe, undercooked, oversold, over-edited, and the comments turned. Followers called it lazy. Insincere. Corporate. Overnight, trust eroded. Because when a person is the product, every post reflects the brand.
The Marketer’s Dilemma: Performance in a Human-Centric Model
Here’s the part no one talks about: the pressure on the marketers behind these accounts.
We’re paid monthly, often on a freelance or contract basis. We’re expected to grow reach, drive conversions, and “keep the account hot.” But what happens when the person we’re promoting doesn’t deliver?
- They’re tired.
- They stop filming.
- They refuse to share inputs for us to create posts.
- They miss trends.
For example, sometimes, the person you’re marketing for simply goes on holiday, and that’s when the traction surfaces most. They take a beautiful trip, change their WhatsApp display picture to a photo at a waterfall, but when asked to share it for content, they politely decline. “It’s just for me,” they say. And as a marketer, you respect that, but also quietly panic because your content calendar is now missing its emotional anchor for the week. The brand doesn’t pause, even if the person behind it needs to. This is the unique burden of human-brand marketing: the disconnect between a lived moment and its marketable version.
What makes this more complicated is that we’re not operating with the resources of a large agency. There’s no video team, no crisis PR, no in-house editor spinning out backup reels. We often manage strategy, scheduling, graphic design, client calls, and post-analytics, sometimes as a team of one or few. And while our systems are strong, we face a different kind of pressure: emotionally-driven delays, limited content pipelines, and the awkwardness of chasing someone for a post they no longer feel like sharing. Marketing people isn’t just difficult; it’s deeply human. And that means no amount of automation or AI can fully prepare you for the work it takes.
The campaign calendar becomes a ghost town. And yet, we’re asked: What did you produce this month? Where’s the growth? Furthermore, unlike product marketing, where budgets are justified by direct sales, marketing a person often comes with no budget and a paycheck that barely reflects the emotional and strategic labour involved.
Suddenly, we’re managing expectations not just of audiences, but of clients, founders, agents, and spreadsheets. KPIs don’t pause for mental health. Contracts don’t care about emotional bandwidth.
This is where our work becomes more than just marketing. It becomes negotiation, empathy, and adaptation.
PESTLE Analysis: Contextualising the Person-Brand
A PESTLE analysis helps us account for the macro forces shaping personal brands:
| Factor | Relevance to Personal Branding |
| Political | Cancel culture, free speech laws, visa issues for international creators, working with public figures who shift political affiliations and cause audience backlash. |
| Economic | Brand deal fluctuations, recession impact on influencer marketing budgets |
| Social | Shifting values (authenticity, mental health), demographic changes |
| Technological | Algorithm changes, platform tools, content automation |
| Legal | Copyright claims, FTC disclosure rules, defamation risks |
| Environmental | Demand for ethical consumption, sustainability transparency |
Understanding these factors allows us to create strategies that are not only brand-aligned but also culturally responsive.
Reference Groups and the Illusion of Authenticity
According to Bearden & Etzel (1982), reference groups shape what we buy and how we behave. In social media, creators aren’t just marketers; they’re reference points. Followers model their lives around them: skincare routines, finance tips, productivity hacks.
This makes personal branding relational. When the person we follow makes a mistake, we feel personally betrayed. Not because they made an error, but because they broke the image we had invested in.
The stakes are high because the emotional investment is real.
Redefining “Engagement” in the Human-Product Era
The biggest issue in digital marketing is how we define and chase engagement.
In its traditional form, engagement is a shallow metric: likes, comments, views, shares. But in the context of human branding, this is reductive. It encourages creators to overshare, provoke, or dramatise just to stay relevant. It breeds burnout and risks authenticity.
So what if we redefined engagement as:
- Resonance: Does this post stay with the audience beyond the scroll?
- Retention: Are followers staying with the brand over time? Are they evolving with the creator?
- Recognition: Can audiences recall and associate the person with their values or expertise?
- Replication: Are followers using the language, advice, or aesthetic of the creator in their content?
This reframing gives marketers a more holistic lens. It encourages strategies that are long-term, reputation-conscious, and person-sustaining, rather than just performance-hungry.
Aspiring celebrities often face a critical fork in the road: should they manage their personal brand themselves or delegate it entirely to someone else? Some go all in—meticulously curating every post, obsessing over engagement data, and turning their life into a perpetual performance. Others choose to export the task, outsourcing captions, edits, and content calendars to digital teams. But both paths come with trade-offs. Total control can lead to burnout and identity entanglement, while full delegation can create a disconnect between the real person and the online persona. As marketers, we’re constantly navigating this tension—capturing someone’s essence in a way that’s marketable, but still feels like them.
Closing Thoughts: Marketing With Empathy in the Age of Image
Marketing people is not just about building an audience. It’s about building sustainable visibility. When we reduce human brands to algorithms and outputs, we fail, not just ethically, but strategically. Because the creator, the founder, the influencer is the engine of the brand. And if the engine breaks, the business stalls.
As digital marketers, we are not just stewards of that brand but also of the personhood it’s built upon. Our job is not only to grow, but to protect, adapt, and honour. Because yes, the person is the product—but unlike most products, this one has boundaries, burnout, and brilliance that can’t be scheduled.
Let’s build systems that respect that.
References
Booms, B. H., & Bitner, M. J. (1981). Marketing strategies and organization structures for service firms. Marketing of Services, 25(3), 47–52
Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Marketing Management (15th ed.). Pearson.
Abidin, C. (2016). “Visibility labour”: Engaging with influencers’ self-branding. Media International Australia, 161(1), 86–100.
Bearden, W. O., & Etzel, M. J. (1982). Reference group influence on product and brand purchase decisions. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(2), 183–194.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.
By Pratishta Natarajan, Student, Masters of Management, Macquarie University, Sydney.