Ramanathan Vythilingam

speaker

390 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Ramanathan Vythilingam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Looking Outside · Who are 'influencers' influencing? (Marketers.) - Marketing Professor Ramanathan Vythilingam · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

Today all of those constraints are gone, right?

Like I could I could create a thousand pieces of content at the click of a button.

I could do synthetic research and get data on the spot.

But the question then is becoming not so much about whether you do all of that, but whether you become intentional now.

Intentional choices, I think, becomes the reality in the world where we have unlimited resources and the ability to do

anything that we ever wanted, but should we do it, I guess becomes the question.

I mean, I think again, influencer marketing is not new per se, um, Joe.

So so in the early days when YouTube started, people started creating video blogs, so vlogs, as a way to kind of showcase their interest in a certain category.

That then transitioned over to when brands started to use those kind of influencers as a way to showcase their products and services.

So it became a paid partnership where brands

Would pay an influencer to review their product or to showcase their product to their audience.

So far, so good.

I think it's just that in the last few years, this whole space has exploded in terms of how much money is going into that space.

And we've started to conflate influencer marketing with a whole lot of other things which are probably not right.

So things like people don't trust brands anymore and therefore

For an influencer is a trustworthy, credible voice is the narrative that was underpinning the space.

I fundamentally don't agree with that idea because if big brands are not trusted, then who is?

And therefore, this whole idea of do I need to get a halo of trustworthiness and credibility through somebody else was always something I struggled with.

So it kind of goes back to saying what

Is a brand using an influencer for?

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