That’s like judging a focus group by whether participants bought something in the room.

The industry is projected to reach £25.5 billion in 2025, representing a 35.6% increase from 2024. Yet 50% of marketers still can’t prove ROI. This measurement failure isn’t because influencer marketing doesn’t work. It’s because you’re forcing R&D-level insights into marketing KPI frameworks.

What You’re Actually Missing

Influencers sit at the intersection of your brand and real consumer behaviour in real time. They’re testing your messaging, your product positioning, even your product itself with their audience—and getting immediate, unfiltered feedback.

That’s not promotion. That’s product development intelligence.

When you budget it as marketing, you can’t justify the time to analyse that feedback properly. You can’t iterate. You certainly can’t afford to “fail” with a campaign that didn’t drive immediate sales but revealed something crucial about your market positioning.

Marketing budgets demand predictable returns. R&D budgets expect some experiments to fail because that’s how you learn.

The Positioning Problem You’d Never Discover

A skincare brand positioned themselves as “clinical-grade” and “dermatologist-approved”—very scientific, very serious. They sent products to several micro-influencers in the wellness space, expecting content around efficacy and ingredient science.

What came back was completely different.

The influencers and their audiences were talking about the sensory experience—the texture, the smell, how it felt in their morning routine, the ritual of application. Comment sections weren’t asking about peptide concentrations. They were sharing how the product made them feel more present during their skincare routine, almost meditative.

The brand’s entire marketing strategy was built around clinical trials and before-and-after photos. But the real consumer insight was that their audience was buying into wellness and self-care rituals, not laboratory results.

You’d never discover this through traditional surveys because people tell you they care about “proven results”—that’s the socially acceptable answer. But their actual behaviour, revealed through authentic influencer content, showed they were making purchasing decisions based on emotional and experiential factors.

If that had been measured as a marketing campaign, it would’ve been deemed a failure. The influencers didn’t use the key messaging, didn’t highlight the clinical benefits, didn’t drive the “right” conversation.

But as R&D? That’s a complete repositioning opportunity worth millions.

Who Should Actually Be in the Room

Right now, influencer campaigns are typically owned by marketing or social media managers. The room is full of people asking, “Will this drive awareness? Will this convert?”

If it’s genuinely R&D spend, you need product development in the room from day one—not as a courtesy invite, but as primary stakeholders.

You need consumer insights teams analysing the qualitative feedback. You need innovation teams looking for unmet needs in those comment sections. Depending on your company, you might even need supply chain or operations people, because sometimes influencer feedback reveals product issues or feature requests that have manufacturing implications.

A consumer electronics brand structured their influencer partnerships co-managed by marketing and their innovation lab. The innovation team would identify specific hypotheses they wanted to test: “Do users actually want this feature we’re considering?” or “Is this pain point as significant as we think?”

Then they’d work with influencers to create content that would naturally surface those topics and observe the organic response.

The collaboration looked less like a campaign approval process and more like designing a research study. They’d have pre-brief meetings where product teams would outline what they needed to learn, not what they needed to promote. Post-campaign, they’d have analysis sessions where they’d code comments thematically, looking for patterns.

Some of that fed directly into product roadmaps.

The Brief You’re Not Writing

A traditional brief might say: “Highlight our new wireless charging feature. Key messages: fastest charging in its class, convenient, premium technology. Include product shots showing the charging dock.”

An R&D-oriented brief would say: “We’re considering adding wireless charging to our next product line, but we’re unsure if it’s a priority feature for our audience or just table stakes. Create content around your current charging frustrations and habits. If it feels natural, mention that wireless charging is something you’ve been exploring. We want to see: Do people engage with this topic? What specific pain points do they mention? Do they see wireless charging as solving those problems, or do they care about something else entirely?”

The difference is you’re not prescribing the conclusion—you’re setting up an environment to observe genuine reactions.

You’re giving the influencer permission to surface disagreement or indifference, which is incredibly valuable data. In a traditional brief, if an influencer’s audience doesn’t care about wireless charging, that’s a failed campaign. In a research brief, that’s a successful finding that just saved you from investing in the wrong feature.

The best research briefs also include questions like: “What surprised you in the comments?” or “What did your audience talk about that we didn’t ask about?”

Often the most valuable insights are the ones you weren’t specifically looking for.

How Speed Beats Access

A wearables company was working with fitness influencers who kept getting the same question in comments: “Does this track strength training properly, or just cardio?” The audience was essentially saying the product was great for runners but useless for people who lift weights.

This company had product teams actively monitoring these partnerships as research. Within two months, they’d prioritised strength training metrics in their next firmware update.

Their main competitor had influencers getting the exact same feedback—you could see it in their comment sections too—but they were measuring those campaigns purely on engagement rates and click-throughs. They saw “successful” campaigns because the numbers looked good.

Six months later, the first company launched with proper strength tracking and positioned it as a major update. The competitor didn’t roll out similar features for another year, and by then they were playing catch-up.

Same public data, completely different response times.

The difference wasn’t access to information. It was having product teams in the loop, having processes to escalate insights quickly, and having budget allocated in a way that justified rapid iteration based on what they were learning.

What You Actually Show Your CFO

You show them the same metrics you’d use for any R&D investment: cost per validated insight, time-to-market improvement, and cost avoidance from killing bad ideas early.

If influencer feedback reveals that a feature you were planning to build actually isn’t a priority for users, you’ve just saved potentially hundreds of thousands in development costs. That’s tangible ROI. You can say, “We were going to invest £200,000 building this feature. Influencer research with a £15,000 spend showed us users don’t care about it. That’s a 13x return on avoiding wasted development.”

Or you track speed metrics: “Traditionally, we’d run focus groups and surveys over three months to validate a concept. Influencer research gave us the same confidence level in three weeks, accelerating our product timeline by 10 weeks.”

You can also measure cost per insight compared to traditional research methods. If a focus group costs £8,000 and gives you feedback from 40 people, but an influencer partnership costs £5,000 and surfaces insights from 2,000 engaged commenters, the unit economics are dramatically better.

You’re not measuring impressions or engagement rates—those are marketing vanity metrics. You’re measuring research outputs: number of product hypotheses validated or invalidated, number of insights that influenced roadmap decisions, reduction in product development risk.

The CFO already understands these metrics from other R&D activities. You’re just applying them to a new research methodology.

The Pilot You Should Run Tomorrow

Work with 2-3 influencers and test out a model where they do a campaign of content—structure the content and storytelling to match your research goals. Run it against a campaign run by your marketing department.

But here’s what companies consistently get wrong in the setup: they try to hedge their bets and end up measuring both approaches with marketing metrics.

They’ll set up the R&D-style brief, get the influencers to surface genuine audience questions and feedback, but then at the end of the pilot, leadership still asks “But what was the engagement rate? How many clicks did we get?”

Suddenly you’re back to comparing apples to oranges.

The experiment fails because you never committed to evaluating the R&D approach on R&D terms. You have to decide upfront: for this pilot, success means actionable insights that inform product decisions, not campaign performance metrics.

Otherwise, the traditional marketing approach will always “win” because it’s optimised for the metrics you’re measuring.

The other mistake is not involving product or innovation teams from the start. If marketing runs both pilots and then tries to extract R&D value afterwards, it doesn’t work. You need product people actively participating in the R&D pilot, attending debriefs, asking follow-up questions to influencers.

Without that, you get a marketing campaign that happened to generate some comments, not actual research.

What Changes When This Becomes Standard

Product departments will finally have to start listening to their customers.

When influencer partnerships become standard R&D practice, you won’t be able to ignore what people are actually saying about your products in real time. You won’t be able to dismiss feedback because it doesn’t match your internal assumptions.

The budget structure determines who’s in the room, and who’s in the room determines whether you learn anything.

Right now, 65% of influencers would rather be involved in creative or product development conversations with brands early on than follow a rigid brief. They’re deeply in tune with the nuance of internet culture and understand what angles will resonate with their own audiences.

You’re already sitting on a network of field researchers. You’re just paying them to be billboards instead.

The question isn’t whether influencer marketing works. The question is whether you’re brave enough to measure it properly.