D2C Brands Are Measuring Influence With the Wrong Ruler
Why judging creators on sales alone misses their real job: trust and consideration. Watch branded search and depth ratios instead of raw views.
The recent debate around Go Zero founder Kiran Shah’s creator-spend question is not really about influencer marketing. It is about measurement. The frustration—spending lakhs on creators without a clear sense of return—exists quietly in many D2C boardrooms.
But the problem is often timing. Brands ask what a reel delivered after the campaign is over. The answer should have been defined before the first creator was shortlisted.
Creators are not a performance channel
Influencer marketing in India has grown into a serious industry, worth more than ₹10,000 crore by KlugKlug’s estimate. Yet it is frequently judged with the same metrics used for search or performance advertising. That is a category error. Search captures intent. Performance marketing converts it. Influencers operate in the consideration layer, where credibility does the heavy lifting.
The consumer path looks more like this:
Creator credibility → Trust → Consideration → Curiosity → Branded search → Purchase
Creators lend borrowed authenticity. They help people feel a product belongs in their life before they are ready to click buy.
Two better signals than views
More views do not automatically mean more sales. A million irrelevant eyeballs can be less valuable than a hundred thousand highly relevant ones. Kalyan Kumar points to two underused indicators.
First, branded search. When a creator does the job, people do not just scroll; they go looking. That search may happen on Google, Amazon, Flipkart, quick-commerce platforms such as Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart, AI-led discovery surfaces, or a brand’s own site. It is a measurable bridge from awareness to intent.
Second, depth ratios. Look past raw reach at:
- Engagement-to-views
- Shares-to-views
- Saves-to-views
- Comment quality and sentiment
These signals show whether the audience genuinely cared, not just whether the algorithm served the content.
Plan the role, not the post-mortem
Replacing independent creators with two in-house creators is not the fix. Variety is part of the mechanism. Over-used creators can see branded posts pull less than 10% of the engagement their regular content earns, because audiences are quick to detect repetition.
The better starting point is audience-first, not logo-first: ask what story the audience would care about and where the product naturally belongs, rather than how to make a creator sell.
Boards should absolutely ask harder questions—just in the planning room, not after the campaign ends.
Source: ETBrandEquity.com
