TikTok influencer and home-cook, Nara Smith, recently released a new Roasted Garlic Oil with Algae Cooking Club. At just 24 years old, Smith has become a recognizable face to the online home-cooking community, along with Gen Z as a whole. She’s known for making intricate recipes from scratch, like homemade Cheez-It’s for her kids, Vietnamese Pho when she’s under the weather, elaborate five-course meals, and even homemade face wash for her model husband, Lucky Blue Smith. After years of regularly posting these mesmerizing videos on TikTok, Nara has now accrued over 12.2 million followers on the app. Given her internet success, it was time for Nara’s career to take its next steps.Â
The new Roasted Garlic Oil was released just a few weeks ago, but Nara’s online posting for the throughout her career, as well as in weeks leading up to the launch, has been helping set the product up for success for some time now. Her marketing strategy has been extremely effective in these two ways:
- Using superficial persuasion cues like her attractiveness, fame, and aesthetic appeal, a.k.a. the peripheral route to persuasion, and avoiding boring, dense, facts based info.Â
The peripheral route to persuasion is a marketing technique that relies on superficial cues to persuade viewers to do something, like buy a product. Superficial cues could be celebrity endorsements, physical attractiveness of the presenter, emotional appeals (watching a sad animal shelter PSA makes you want to go adopt a puppy), and other non-factual, yet compelling factors. As opposed to the central route to persuasion, which is facts-based, and helps to persuade viewers who are paying more attention, the peripheral route is extremely effective toward Nara’s audience: her TikTok fan base.
TikTok users are used to mindless, short content—it’s what they go on the app for. Sharing dense information that requires effortful processing would bore viewers instantly, deterring them rather than persuading them. However, Nara’s superficial, visual cues (like her stunning recipes and outrageous outfits) are easy for viewers to process without paying close attention, and are more immediately captivating to impatient TikTok users who otherwise will scroll within seconds.Â
Think about a time you saw someone use, say, an at-home ice cream machine to make luscious looking sorbet. Watching a mouth watering, visually appealing TikTok video made you want to buy the product more so than a list of facts on a page, or a boring monologue given by a random person selling a product.
So how do superficial cues specifically help to market Nara’s Roasted Garlic Oil? Well for one, she’s Nara Smith. The peripheral route to persuasion in marketing asserts that passive viewers, like TikTok users scrolling without a real purpose, are more likely to take suggestions from physically attractive people, and Nara Smith is quite literally a model. Meaning, if she’s telling you to buy her garlic oil (pretend you’re zoning out scrolling on TikTok), you’re more likely to listen.
The peripheral route to persuasion works because viewers subconsciously associate the superficial cues they see with the product. Consumers believe that if they use the same Roasted Garlic Oil seen in her aesthetically pleasing, mouth-watering videos, their own home-cooked food will look and taste just as great. Plus, Nara has authenticated herself as a credible source: a talented home-chef, an uncontroversial influencer with millions of followers, and someone who prioritizes a clean lifestyle. Consumers believe that they can “be like Nara Smith” and replicate her perfect recipes if they obtain her product.
- Not-so-coincidental “garlic oil” mentions and product placement in videos leading up to the launch. This is called priming in the marketing world.
In the handful of posts leading up to the product lunch, Nara’s TikTok’s featured recipes that required garlic oil, like focaccia and various garlicky spreads. The oil in the videos was unlabeled, and it wasn’t the highlight of the video at all. Yet, by casually exposing viewers to garlic oil so close to the release of her own product, Nara was able to prime viewers to want to buy her oil once she released it. Â
In marketing, priming is the subconscious influence on someone’s decisions based on exposure to that stimulus, so in this case subtle exposure to garlic oil right before having the opportunity to buy Nara’s Roasted Garlic Oil. She didn’t shove the idea in anyone’s face, tiring them of the product before it was even available. Instead, viewers were subconsciously motivated to buy the product once they saw it. Influencers often use this strategy before a product release, and consumers don’t even notice.Â
Nara Smith is the perfect example of influencer marketing done right. Her simplistic persuasion methods and subtle product-type exposure were key factors in increasing sales of the new Roasted Garlic Oil. Â