During our recent conversation with garden writer and horticultural lecturer Ross Pearson, we got onto the subject of gardening content on social media.
Ross summed up one of its biggest problems rather neatly: “I think the problem comes when confidence is mistaken for expertise.”
That line has stuck with me, partly because I see it happening all the time. There is no shortage of confident people online. Some are knowledgeable, experienced and generous with what they know. Others are simply very good at looking into a camera, delivering a line with conviction and keeping people entertained.
Those are not the same skill, although you could be forgiven for thinking they are from some of the brand collaborations appearing in the garden sector.
Someone can make lively, amusing gardening content without really understanding plants, soil, plant care issues or what happens when people follow their advice. The video may look convincing, and the presenter may have hundreds of thousands of followers, but that does not make the information reliable. If the advice is poor, the viewer is still left with a dead plant, wasted money and the nagging feeling that they must have done something wrong.
During the podcast, Kate described seeing a well-known garden influencer recommending drought-tolerant plants on the basis that you could buy one from a garden centre and no longer need to worry about watering it.
Of course, that isn’t how it works. A newly planted lavender still needs water, especially when it’s sitting in a pot. So does an echinacea while it establishes. “Drought tolerant” is not an enchanted forcefield that appears the moment the contactless payment goes through.
A knowledgeable gardener will see straight through advice like that. Someone who is new to gardening may not and could quite reasonably follow the presenter’s advice.
Entertainment is not the enemy
Before this turns into a grumpy-old-man attack on anyone who enjoys themselves on Instagram, I do think entertainers have a place.
Gardening can sometimes be presented as though it belongs to an elite group of people who already know the Latin names, own several obscure hand tools and have very strong views about compost. A warm, funny or slightly chaotic personality can make the subject feel far more accessible.
They may attract people who would never watch a traditional gardening programme or seek out advice from a professional horticulturist. They can make gardening feel enjoyable rather than worthy, technical or intimidating, and anything that encourages more people to take an interest in growing things has got to be a good thing.
People don’t follow social accounts purely to be educated. They follow because they like the presenter, enjoy the humour, find the content relaxing or want five minutes of escape while avoiding whatever they’re meant to be doing.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Not every gardening video needs to teach a transferable skill or end with somebody correctly identifying a mineral deficiency.
The problem begins when popularity is treated as proof of knowledge, and when brands assume that a large audience must also be a captive audience.
Somebody may command a great deal of attention without having much influence over what people believe about a gardening product. If the audience is mainly there for the personality, the jokes or the presenter’s ability to turn a simple job into a minor crisis, the gardening itself may be little more than scenery.
Put a product into that environment and it can easily become another prop in the performance. It will be visible, certainly, but visibility alone does not make it valuable.
What does the audience actually trust them for?
We all trust different people for different things.
I might enjoy a comedian’s take on modern life without asking them to diagnose a problem with my roses. I could admire an actor’s clothes without assuming they understand textile manufacturing. Someone can be funny, likeable and worth following without their authority extending automatically to every product that happens to appear in their feed.
That transfer of authority is what brands seem to take for granted. A creator has a large audience. A business has a product. Put the two together and, apparently, some of the creator’s popularity will rub off on whatever they’re holding.
Sometimes it does. A creator may have built a reputation around good judgement, personal experience or specialist knowledge. Their audience understands what they stand for and trusts their recommendations within that particular area. But that trust has boundaries.
A gardening audience might trust a presenter to make them laugh. It may enjoy watching them tackle jobs badly, get covered in compost or fall over a wheelbarrow. That doesn’t mean the same audience believes they can explain why one fertiliser, tool or plant-care product is better than another. So what is the relationship really based on?
Are people following for practical advice, inspiration and expertise? Are they there for entertainment, aspiration or the presenter’s personality? Or did the algorithm simply serve them a clip involving tight shorts, gyrating hips and a potted geranium?
The answer has a direct bearing on the value of the collaboration. A large audience may be perfectly useful when the job is broad awareness. But if the product needs explanation, reassurance or credibility, reach is a rather flimsy basis on which to choose a partner.
When the association makes the product look worse
Some influencer collaborations are not merely ineffective. I think they can actively devalue the product.
Brands are often reluctant to acknowledge that possibility. The assumption seems to be that additional exposure must be positive, or at least harmless. More people have seen the product, so something useful must have happened. But the company a brand keeps affects how that brand is perceived and feels.
If a serious, well-researched product is presented by someone whose gardening advice is routinely questionable, some of that lack of credibility can rub off. If the content is gimmicky, the product can start to feel gimmicky as well. If every partnership becomes another excuse for a skit, the audience may remember the performance without taking in anything meaningful about the product.
The people most likely to notice the mismatch are often the very customers the brand should care about: experienced gardeners, horticultural professionals, knowledgeable enthusiasts and retail buyers.
They understand the category. They can tell when a demonstration is unrealistic or when the presenter doesn’t really understand what they’re promoting. They can also tell when the product has simply been shoehorned into content because money has changed hands.
A collaboration may attract thousands of views and comments while reducing the brand’s standing among the people whose opinion carries the most weight. That strikes me as a very expensive way to buy engagement.
Some of the partnerships I see are genuinely baffling. A business may have spent years developing a product, testing its performance, refining the formulation and trying to build credibility. It then hands that product to someone whose main qualification appears to be an ability to dance enthusiastically while holding a trowel.
Perhaps I’m being harsh, but I don’t think I am.
The content may perform well according to the platform’s numbers, yet strip away much of the substance that made the product worth promoting. Rather than borrowing credibility from the creator, the brand ends up lending its own credibility to them.
Follower numbers provide an easy answer
I can understand why brands fall into this trap. Follower numbers are visible, simple, reassuringly easy to put into a spreadsheet, and display in a board meeting.
One creator has 400,000 followers and another has 40,000. Without looking any deeper, the first appears to offer ten times the opportunity. It makes the decision feel evidence-based, even when very little evidence has been considered.
That calculation tells you nothing about why people follow, how much trust exists or whether anyone takes notice when a product is recommended. Nor does it reveal how many people came for the gardening and how many came because the creator is amusing.
A smaller account may have an audience that actively seeks advice, saves posts, asks questions and acts on recommendations. A much larger one may generate far more views but very little serious interest in the products it features.
Neither is automatically better. They may simply be useful for different things.
Engagement rates can add more context, but even those need interpreting. A flood of laughing emojis underneath a funny video doesn’t tell you whether anybody understood why the product was there. Comments and views show that activity took place. They don’t prove that credibility increased or that the association left people feeling better about the brand.
This is where measurement can become misleading. The easiest numbers to collect are not always the ones that tell you whether the work has done anything useful.
Expertise still needs to hold attention
The answer isn’t to swing to the opposite extreme and insist that only the most highly qualified expert should appear in branded content.
Expertise without communication is not especially useful either.
Ross made this point during our conversation. C.H. Middleton, Percy Thrower and Geoff Hamilton had formidable horticultural knowledge, but they were also media personalities. They knew how to explain, demonstrate and connect with an audience. (And if you don’t know who these people are, ask your parents, or probably your grandparents!)
Had they been working today, they would almost certainly have used social media.
The strongest creators combine authority with personality. They know the subject, but they also know how to make it interesting. They can simplify an idea without making it inaccurate and entertain people without turning the product into a joke.
That combination is valuable precisely because it isn’t easy to find. A genuine expert may not have the largest following. Their videos may not be frantic enough to satisfy the algorithm, and they may be less inclined to dance while pointing at a packet of plant food. But when they explain a product, the recommendation rests on something more substantial than confidence.
They can tell people why it works, when to use it, where it may not be suitable and what result they should reasonably expect. They can respond to the next question rather than simply delivering a line from an approved brief.
For brands selling products that need to earn trust, that depth must surely count for something.
This isn’t only a gardening problem
Gardening gives us a particularly clear example because practical knowledge eventually meets reality. The plant survives or it doesn’t. The method works or it doesn’t. It may take a few weeks or months, but poor advice is eventually exposed.
The same tension exists in almost every category. Fashion, technology, fitness, parenting and personal finance all have their versions of the confident entertainer whose popularity is assumed to give them authority. The level of risk and expertise required may vary, but the commercial mistake is broadly the same.
Someone is popular within a general area, so the brand assumes their influence extends naturally to its product.
Sometimes the partnership makes perfect sense. Sometimes it creates awareness but little else. Occasionally it makes you wonder whether anyone involved has stopped to consider how the association will look to the people they’re trying to attract.
Asking whether influencer marketing works is far too broad to be helpful. Of course it can work. So can television, email, packaging, retail media, sponsorship and almost every other form of marketing when used well.
The more useful question is whether this particular person, with this particular audience, is right for the job the brand needs done.
What job are you asking them to do?
A creator partnership might be intended to attract attention, explain a product, demonstrate it in use, lend credibility, create desire or persuade someone to buy. Those aren’t all the same job.
An entertainer may be excellent at attracting attention. An experienced gardener may be much better at explaining and demonstrating the product. Someone who combines knowledge, personality and a trusted relationship with their audience may be able to do both.
Problems arise when nobody decides what matters most. A marketing team chooses a creator because they’re visible, then expects the content to generate awareness, credibility, education and sales all at once. When the results come back, the number of views is used as proof that it worked, even though the product played a minor role and the audience learnt almost nothing about it.
A better brief begins with the brand rather than the creator. What impression are you trying to create? What does the audience need to understand or believe? Does the product require specialist explanation or a credible demonstration? Would this person’s involvement strengthen the promise or make it feel less believable?
And how will the partnership look to the people whose opinion actually matters?
A collaboration can reach a huge audience and still send the wrong message to the customers, buyers or professionals the brand most wants to impress.
Choose the company your brand keeps
Influencer marketing is sometimes treated as though a creator is simply another media channel. The business provides the product, the creator provides the audience and the two are combined to generate exposure.
But people aren’t blank advertising spaces. They bring their own personality, reputation, values and credibility to the relationship. The product doesn’t merely appear in their content; it becomes associated with them.
That association can make the product feel more relevant, trustworthy and desirable. It can also make it feel lightweight, opportunistic or ridiculous.
Brands need to think carefully about the company they keep. The most visible person isn’t always the most influential, the most entertaining person isn’t necessarily the most persuasive, and the largest audience is not automatically the right one.
There is room for entertainers, educators and experts. Each can offer something useful in the right context, but brands should be clear about which one they are dealing with and what they are expecting them to achieve.
Attention tells you that people are watching. Authority gives them a reason to believe what is being said. Confusing the two may still deliver an impressive number of views. It may not do much for the brand.