Friday, 29th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

What brand influencing means to me – Sophia Egbueje

The new goldmine in the entertainment space is to be a brand influencer. The venture has become so lucrative that entertainers with cult followership smile to the bank in millions, just by laundering the image of some brands. A brand influencer is an individual who leverages his/her social media prowess to authentically engage and connect…

Sophia Egbueje

The new goldmine in the entertainment space is to be a brand influencer. The venture has become so lucrative that entertainers with cult followership smile to the bank in millions, just by laundering the image of some brands.

A brand influencer is an individual who leverages his/her social media prowess to authentically engage and connect audiences and brands—meaning a social media influencer partners with a brand to create sponsored content.

In today’s consumer-driven landscape, it’s increasingly more common for advertisers to tap brand influencers in order to achieve marketing objectives.

But to Sophia Chinwe Egbueje, being a brand influencer goes beyond mere marketing of products and laundering image even though that is what she has been doing for most of the last five years.

“To be a fashion and lifestyle influencer, one must first find his/or herself. One cannot exactly influence if he or she is being influenced themselves. To be a fashion influencer, one must understand that there is no good or bad fashion, there is just fashion and whether you can pull it off or not, confidence will serve you better than a stylist,” she said.

“I consider brand influencing to be lifestyle; from when I open my eyes in the morning till when I close them back at night. My most amazing memories occur when I see my influence in others. This is why brand influencing is important to me, I do not just want to influence young girls with my fashion and lifestyle, I want to positively influence them. I want to see the positivity of my influence. I don’t want people to see me as perfect, I want them to see me as someone that made it work so they can finally believe that they, too, can do better,” she added.

“I decided very early that I wanted to set a very high and tasteful example for myself and then for others, I wanted to stand out, I wanted to spread love and I wanted to positively influence my society as much as I could, this is what influencing is to me,” she asserted.

Sophia Chinwe Ogbueje never set out to be an influencer, there was no such vocation or career until the advent of Instagram. She began life as a model at the age of 16 and also went into ushering and hosting guests. She has however given a good account of herself as an influencer.

She’s always challenging herself to bring out the best in her, while also influencing the lives of other girls because she believes in the supremacy and the sophistication of the female mind.

In the age of social media, consumers are no longer solely at the mercy of blatant, unnatural, and suspicious advertising. Instead, consumers have taken to social media to build vast networks of peers whose opinions they trust, value, and share. Whereas brands used to dictate what they were in the eyes of consumers, consumers now define brands.

As Adstream puts it, “consumers are the ones driving the advertising process.” This colossal shift in power from brands to consumers has led brands to adopt new strategies that harness this resounding word-of-mouth model—influencer marketing.

In this article

0 Comments