About 45% of brand spending on influencer marketing this year will go to creators with fewer than 20,000 followers, up from 19.5% in 2021, according to Emarketer research cited by Morning Brew. The shift captures a broader realignment: as consumers move their purchase journeys onto TikTok Shop, chatbots and creator feeds, brands are rebuilding their marketing around an old currency—trust.

"What we've seen time and time again is, content that's authentic performs best," Vivien Garnès, co-CEO of influencer marketing platform Upfluence, told Retail Brew. "And it's not just a better look—I think it's also a better use of your marketing dollars."

The trust economy under pressure

The trust economy spans online reviews, creator endorsements and word-of-mouth conversations, according to Chris Ribeiro, founder of market research firm Starlight Analytics and a former customer analytics and insights leader at VF Corporation and PVH Corp. But a flood of fake reviews, bots and AI-generated content is eroding it.

"There's a whole cottage industry now of companies that are trying to buy their way into Reddit communities to talk about their product, to talk about their brand and their services," Ribeiro said. "So they plant comments, and then they plant people responding to those comments because they recognize that will help them show up on Google more favorably, or through search on ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude."

"We're entering a phase now where AI is making it more dangerous and giving less value to some elements of the trust economy, because now you don't know what to trust," he added.

Creators are the catalog

Brands are building large, distributed networks of small-time creators rather than betting on celebrity endorsements, driven by higher engagement rates and lower marketing spend. One-fifth of influencer spend will go to "nanoinfluencers" with fewer than 5,000 followers.

"It used to be that it was 10 times easier to work with one-tenth of the creators than 10x the creators," Garnès said. "Now it's, how do you maximize for ROI and not necessarily for time spent, and it is a lot more efficient and effective to work with large volumes of very small creators and target that long tail of the creator distribution."

Smaller individual deals can also build trust, Garnès noted, because those influencers may feel more empowered to give their honest take on a product. The trade-off is management overhead: brands must vet each creator, align content with brand values and watch for signs of fakes, Ribeiro said.

Garnès described a spectrum of creator strategies, from using influencers as a distribution channel to co-creating products or granting equity. "That really contributes to creating content that's authentic, that's genuine," he said, "and what we've seen is that time and time again, this outperforms content that is just being distributed basically as if the creator was a human billboard."

Beyond creators, Garnès advises brands to lean on every legitimate trust signal available: robust customer support and strong money-back guarantees among them. "My recommendation usually is to go all-out on any trust signals you can rightfully put out to the world," he said.

Everyone's a reviewer

When Ribeiro worked at VF Corporation, a creator posted a video about getting drenched in a North Face rain jacket. Instead of ignoring the negative attention, the brand ran a campaign to make things right—and earned positive attention for the response.

"Not trying to wash over some of the tarnish, I think, is good," Ribeiro said. "Encourage people to be honest about things. Actually listening to what they have to say, responding in a way that's real and not overly polished, I think you get credit for that stuff."

Eli Goodman, president and co-founder of clickstream data provider Datos, cautioned brands against gaming the system with bot-written reviews. Organic trust-building also matters for AI visibility, he said: "It's very important to have as many people talking about how trustworthy you are, or your product, or your service, or whatever it may be, so that AIs pick it up."

Search meets the chatbot

According to a recent Datos report, consumers now commonly toggle between search engines, social sites, e-commerce platforms, AI assistants, online communities and brand websites while shopping. AI remains a small but growing traffic source: AI-generated visits run at about one-tenth the volume of traditional search and half the volume of e-commerce site visits.

The report recommends brands create pages and comparison tables targeting competitors, explaining why their brand is the better choice. It also encourages soliciting customer video reviews and sharing them on social media with "detailed, searchable language" to attract AI attention.

"The brands that win are optimizing for high-intent language while still anticipating questions potential customers will face," SEO and marketing expert Edward Sturm wrote in the report, "[and] ensuring positive reviews are distributed across platforms."

Shopping the live feed

More than 90 million US adults have been exposed to livestream shopping, according to market research firm MRI-Simmons. Livestream buyers are 60% more likely than the average US adult to click on video ads in apps for displayed products and are more receptive to scanning QR codes—a pattern MRI-Simmons called "a clear call to pair video placements with frictionless checkout paths."

Attention spans leave brands only seconds. "You gotta hook 'em and you gotta hook 'em fast," Goodman said.

The store as verification channel

Physical retail is adapting too. "Trust is now the differentiator," Jessica Gangoso, VP of emerging brands at real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, wrote on LinkedIn. She urged brands designing physical spaces to capture attention "through atmosphere, energy, and cultural relevance, not just product," then hold it and prompt customers to share the experience "organically."

"The most compelling retail environments are starting to behave less like static stores and more like platforms with calendars that have evolved beyond fashion seasonality and more toward frequent drops, collaborations, and community moments," Gangoso wrote, "giving consumers a reason to return over and over again."

Because many shoppers now start the purchase process online, Ribeiro said, "the store is playing a role as the channel to try/verify versus one that was primarily focused on discovery." He points to omni-pricing, buy-online-pickup-in-store, in-store star ratings, real-time inventory visibility and treating online returns "as opportunities instead of burdens" as the new baseline for an effective store experience.