Cut the Celebrity. Not the Category.

Every founder who cancels the influencer line this year is asking the same question, and rightly so: should we still be doing influencer marketing? That may not be the right question.

According to McKinsey’s research, Gen Z is not rejecting recommendations from people it trusts. It’s rejecting recommendations that read as a brand talking through a paid mouthpiece, and most influencer budgets are still built almost entirely out of that second thing.

The confusion is understandable. One word, “influencer,” currently covers a ₹5 lakh celebrity endorsement and a ₹3,000 nano-creator post, and both get graded on the same question: did trust go up? Mostly it didn’t, because the blended average gets dragged down by the tier that structurally can’t produce trust in the first place. Brands are giving up the sliver of spend that was already outperforming everything else, to stop funding the majority that was never going to work.

"Gen Z isn't tired of being sold to by people it trusts. It's tired of being sold to by people who are obviously being paid to sound like they aren't."

An ₹18 lakh line, cut in one meeting

To make the argument concrete, take a scenario built around how a mid-size, Gen Z-first Indian D2C brand actually spends: a ₹75 lakh annual marketing budget, an ₹18 lakh slice earmarked for influencer partnerships, and a founder who has just proposed zeroing that line out entirely after a string of underwhelming posts from a handful of larger creators.

Framed this way, the founder’s instinct is defensible on its face: the macro creators underperformed, so cut the category. But the 92/8 split above was never a balanced test of “influencer marketing.” It was a test of celebrity-adjacent posting, with a rounding error’s worth of budget spent on the tier Gen Z actually trusts.

Every growth number is still pointing up

Six figures that don’t square with “Gen Z is done with influencers”:

The loudest brands this year are the ones quitting the channel publicly. But 87% of brands are moving the other direction, and the underlying market, Gen Z’s spending power, India’s creator economy, purchase decisions traced back to a creator, is expanding on every measure above. The businesses cutting the whole line are responding to a channel that stopped working for the specific way they were using it, not to a shrinking one.

The founder’s diagnosis, rerun with the data

Weigh each rupee of the ₹18 lakh line by the trust it actually buys, using McKinsey’s finding that Gen Z trusts a micro-influencer’s recommendation 3.2x more than a celebrity’s (69% vs. 22%). The ₹16.56 lakh spent on macro and celebrity-adjacent talent produced roughly 16.6 units of trust-weighted value at that baseline. The ₹1.44 lakh spent on nano and micro creators, using the same multiplier, produced roughly 4.6 units. Spending only 8% of the budget, the smaller tier delivered close to 22% of the line’s total trust-weighted value.

Run the same math the other way and, rupee for rupee, the nano/micro spend was outperforming the macro/celebrity spend by close to 3x, before counting the engagement gap: nano and micro creators in India typically run 7–10% engagement versus 1–3% for macro accounts, a difference independent research on smaller-following creators (Harvard Business Review, 2024) attributes to the same mechanism: audiences read a smaller account’s endorsement as a person talking, not a media placement running.

"The founder's read was that influencer marketing isn't working. The data says something narrower: the 92% of the line spent on the tier Gen Z trusts least wasn't working. The 8% spent on the tier it trusts most was already outperforming it three-to-one."

Not all “influencer” means the same thing

Trust and engagement move in the opposite direction from follower count, India benchmarks 2025–26:

Perceived control, not follower count, drives avoidance

A 2023 Psychology & Marketing study by Pradhan, Kuanr and colleagues found Gen Z’s avoidance of influencer-endorsed brands is driven specifically by perceived brand control over the influencer’s content, a dynamic the researchers found gets stronger with macro influencers and weaker with micro influencers and creators the audience already has a real relationship with. The anger isn’t at being marketed to. It’s at feeling managed.

The fatigue is real. It’s also concentrated.

The steelman case for quitting deserves stating plainly: 68% of shoppers are frustrated by the sheer volume of sponsored content, 65% follow fewer influencers than a few years ago, and when Gen Z is asked to rank trusted sources in the abstract, friends and family (56%) and product reviews (54%) beat “influencers” as a category (39%). If that were the whole picture, cutting the line would be the rational call.

It isn’t the whole picture, because “influencer” as a category is not one thing to trust or distrust. It’s an average of a tier Gen Z treats like a friend and a tier it treats like an ad break. Once the Pradhan research’s mechanism is applied, avoidance driven by perceived brand control, which intensifies with macro talent and fades with micro creators who have a real relationship with their audience, the 39% figure stops looking like a verdict on influencer marketing and starts looking like a verdict on the celebrity-heavy mix most budgets are still built around.

Same ₹18 lakh, two decisions

Modeled trust-weighted value at identical spend, using McKinsey’s 3.2x micro-vs-celebrity trust multiplier applied to the scenario’s ₹18 lakh line. Illustrative, not a claimed campaign result.

Three brands that recast the tier. One pattern that didn’t.

Bombay Shaving Company: a rap video instead of a celebrity deal

Facing a Gen Z audience tuning out its category’s usual celebrity-fronted grooming ads, Bombay Shaving Company went Gen-Z-first instead of quiet, pairing its trimmer range with culturally fluent, creator-style content, including a rap video with musician Dishant Kamble built to sound like it came from inside the culture rather than a media plan aimed at it. The brand crossed ₹100 crore in annualized revenue run rate within nine months of the pivot, moving over 2,000 units a day. The lesson isn’t that a rap video works everywhere. It’s that recasting the format to read as a peer’s culture, not a brand’s ad, outperformed staying with the safer, celebrity-adjacent default.

Nykaa: turning the influencer line into a tracked revenue channel

Nykaa didn’t retreat from creators when attribution got hard. It built the infrastructure to measure them properly. Affiliate links and creator-specific tracking let the brand see, campaign by campaign, which partnerships were converting and which were merely generating impressions, then continuously reweight the roster toward the ones that worked. That measurement layer is what let Nykaa keep leaning on influencer-led tutorials and reviews as a genuine revenue driver for Gen Z and millennial shoppers, rather than a line item nobody could defend at budget time. Discipline, not abandonment, made the spend defensible.

Unilever: fixing the fraud instead of fleeing the channel

When influencer fraud (paid and bot-inflated followings) threatened to undermine trust across the industry, Unilever’s leadership under then-CMO Keith Weed didn’t pull the brand’s influencer budgets. It built a verification system that screened out creators with suspicious follower activity and refused to work with any influencer known to have paid for followers, with Weed warning publicly that “trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback.” One of the world’s largest advertisers treated the fraud problem as an execution failure to fix, not a channel-level reason to exit.

Legacy beauty brands, losing Gen Z without ever cutting a budget

Not every failure here is a brand that quit the channel outright. Some simply never recast it for the audience that mattered most. Morning Consult’s brand-tracking research on the beauty category found legacy names losing 15 to 26 points of brand awareness specifically among Gen Z relative to the general population, even as those brands kept running campaigns built around the same macro and celebrity-led playbook that had worked with older cohorts.

The budget never disappeared. It just kept buying the tier this generation trusts least, while digital-native, creator-led challengers captured the share the legacy names left open.

The pattern across these four

Every brand that grew did so by changing what “influencer marketing” meant inside its own budget: Bombay Shaving Company changed the creative register, Nykaa changed the measurement layer, Unilever changed the vetting standard. None of them cut the category. The brands that lost ground didn’t necessarily cut it either. The legacy beauty names simply never recast it, running the same celebrity-weighted playbook until the awareness gap became structural. Cutting the whole line and never recasting it turn out to be two versions of the same mistake: treating “influencer marketing” as one undifferentiated thing, instead of a set of tiers that behave in opposite directions with this audience.

So is avoiding influencer marketing the right call?

For most of the brands making that call publicly this year, no, not as a blanket decision. The data these brands are citing, fatigue, falling category trust, disclosure backlash, is real, but it describes the macro and celebrity tier specifically. The tier Gen Z actually trusts (nano and micro creators, engaging at 7–10% with a 69% trust score) was 8% of that same budget and already outperforming the rest. Cutting the whole line doesn’t remove the risk brands are worried about. It removes the one part of the spend that wasn’t the risk, to keep protecting the part that was.

What this means for founders and CMOs building for Gen Z

An influencer line item that isn’t working is evidence the tier mix inside it was never examined, not evidence the channel is broken. The decision that has to come before “cut or keep” is which tier actually earned the ₹18 lakh’s poor reputation, because in scenario after scenario, it’s rarely the tier doing the least talking.

Gen Z isn't opting out of being influenced. It's opting out of being managed by people who are obviously being paid to seem like they aren't. That distinction isn't a reason to leave the channel. It's the entire brief for how to spend inside it.

Sources and methodology