"Podification" - beyond the bubble....

Exploring the upsides of podifcation and the impact on influencer strategies

A week ago I wrote about “podification” – an unspoken mega-trend impacting multiple categories across the globe, and seemingly not yet fully articulated.

Trends can be very nebulous – so to counter that, today’s focus is on influencer strategies, and how these need to be re-appraised to plug into a “pod” mindset.

Podification can be seen as a sort of cancelling out of the outside world – a sort of “do not disturb sign” – and as such a willful cutting off of social contacts. Implying introversion and at worse isolation.

Well, yes and no – podification is a way of cutting off unwanted social interaction or contacts. People with whom you have nothing in common. People who don’t share your values, mindset.

Conversely, podification is just as much a way of tuning into worlds that are more appealing.

This can take many forms, e.g.:

• Escapism – fantasy fiction is booming, for example.

• Playfulness, fun - in the form of gaming – a pod way of getting lost in a competitive fictional battle to beat others, becoming the global champ.

It’s often about new ways of sharing, belonging – “pod-grouping”. This can be digital, say with WhatsApp groups – but there are plenty of real-life pod groups, people that go into town in 3s or 4s, but only hang with their group. P. Sloterdyk would likely refer to pair relationships - also a form of podification ( Spheres/ Bubbles. Vol 1)

For marketing there are multiple take-outs, but let’s concentrate on influencer strategies. Or “sharing” in the right way.

The backdrop in brief: the “reconfiguration of everyday life” (Appleton ;) is continuing apace – analogue delivery modes being nudged firmly aside by digital Supermarkets? Amazon Prime…. for seemingly everything. Reading books? Podcasts, Audible. Time and attention re-allocation slots are being fought over.

Add on the concept of disintermediation – direct-to-consumer if you like – and you see how the world of “influencers” is both changing and expanding rapidly. Substack is booming. Ditto citizen journalism. These new forms of influence have a different sense of immediacy and trust – making connections seemingly more direct, personal – with legacy authority figures or institutions being challenged, dismantled.

The sensitivity of “podification” - a rapid filtering in and out of stuff - is changing influencer expectations, notably on ethics, placing a higher onus on authenticity.

Podified spaces are hugely personal - endorsements too. They are becoming ways of letting people (wherever they are) share or enter a very personal world – and through that a sense of lifestyle. The sort of living a listener would like to have, or can relate to. Far away from the potential mundaneness of a real-life context.

This can be more emotional – think Taylor Swift – or simply a sharing of personal product preferences, stuff that your family has owned or cherished for maybe decades.

So when brands or products get involved, or promises made about them, they have to be about buying into a way of life, and underlying that, a set of shared values. Personal. Real. Authentic.

So whilst at first glance podification is seemingly about a distant gaze, people in their own world, closed off to externals, actually it’s more about people engaging in something much more meaningful in their own digitally extended world than what they see around them.

And that doesn’t have to be a Yellow Submarine.

If you’d like to discuss more, get in touch - I’ll be at the Wiesbaden trade fair in Germany in a couple of days time.

Curious, as ever, as to others’ views.