You would possibly dismiss as mere gimmicks merchandise from YouTube stars like MrBeast and Logan Paul—suppose Feastables snacks and Prime vitality drinks, respectively. However billionaire enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen leans towards one other view: that they symbolize the way forward for consumer-product relationships.
The explanation that Coca-Cola, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and their ilk exist, he lately argued, is “because of the media of the era in which those brands were created.”
Andreessen laid out his reasoning this week on The Ben & Marc Present, a podcast he hosts with Ben Horowitz, a fellow cofounder of the VC agency a16z, aka Andreessen Horowitz.
He cited different notable manufacturers led by non-YouTube celebrities, amongst them George Clooney’s Casamigos Tequila and Kim Kardashian’s Skims shapewear, which she’s turned into a $4 billion business.
“The historical way of looking at this, I think, would be these are gimmicks,” Andreessen mentioned. “Fans of somebody are going to buy the thing they recommend for a while,” however “most consumer markets are not this.”
It’s conglomerates like Unilever, Kraft Meals, and Procter & Gamble that present the buyer merchandise consumers typically encounter.
However a “more aggressive argument that could be made—which is kind of where I am—is maybe the influencer/creator-branded, kind of individually-branded things, this might be the future of consumer products generally,” Andreessen mentioned.
Within the mass media period, he continued, firms constructed manufacturers primarily by way of TV commercials, the place “you had a single shot get Coca-Cola established, or whatever is was. You had celebrities in those days, but they weren’t front-and-center in this effort because you were just trying to get the basic message of the of the product out, for the most part.”
However that led to an “unnatural configuration,” he mentioned, the place particular person customers had a relationship with a model or company, somewhat than with an individual. “If that’s all I can have, then okay, fine, but like, really, that’s my emotional affinity? That’s how I’m going to kind of process things?”
Against this, he mentioned, his younger son loves MrBeast, a task mannequin for him and tens of millions of different youngsters. One may argue it’s nonetheless not an actual relationship because it isn’t two-way, however “it’s a relationship with a person,” Andreessen famous.
“Maybe we’re at the beginning of what is a monster wave,” he mentioned, “and we’ll be sitting here 20 years from now and it will turn out this was basically the great transition, and in the future the brands will actually all be individually led.”
