BitDepth 1570 for July 06, 2026

At an event marking its 15th anniversary on July 01, Media InSite hosted a panel discussion exploring the experience with influencer marketing in the Caribbean.

On the panel were communications and marketing professionals from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago alongside a manager of local influencers, gathered to discuss a marketing option which has grown from US$9.7 billion in 2020 to $37.2 billion in 2025.

How are influencers used?

Feisal Muradali, Regional Marketing Manager for the Unicomer Group explained his company’s approach.

“At Unicomer, across the region, we do use influencers at varying degrees, depending on what our vectors are. We have actually done a lot of work with micro-influencers who are content creators, and we’ve really been able to leverage them to build awareness and to provide insight into what we’re doing with our consumers.”

Latoy Lawrence, Head of Marketing, Flow Jamaica, said that influencers should always be used strategically, never tactically.

“Once you’ve identified that you have the right influencer, you need to look through your intent, what role does the influencer play. Where we make a mistake sometimes, is that we think that influencers are somehow brand builders. You can’t outsource your brand building”

“We do use influencers in our marketing in Jamaica. You need to make sure you have an end-to-end plan, and you move through that funnel from awareness to conversion, and you see what role the influencer plays in that.”
“Where some brands have made mistakes is [in using] the influencer for brand building. You can’t really outsource your brand building; You have to work through the whole 360 [degree marketing] plan and use influencers as partners.”

How are influencers chosen?

Devin Griffith of G&A Communications in Barbados explained that his company considers the entire marketing landscape and environment on behalf of their customers to identify critical areas of brand expression and brand engagement with their audiences.

“From the perspective of influencer marketing, our primary concern or area of focus tends to be the audience. The primary value that we see is that voice that can amplify the message and be a great brand ambassador, but what we’re concerned about is the profile of your audience. Is that audience aligned, is there purchase intent within that audience that’s aligned with the brands that we represent?”

“Authenticity is what would shift influencer marketing from simply a media spend to building brand advocacy,” said Feisal Muradali. With brand advocacy and authenticity is where you get that alignment of your brand values with those of the influencer.

“[Category relevance is] a huge focus for us, ensuring that the content creator, the micro-influencer, whoever we select, is relevant almost to the point that the [content creator] is seen as an expert in their field. That’s a critical point of being able to utilize the value that they bring.”

“It’s very important when you’re selecting these content creators, these influencers, that your values align. We do enough research about them to understand where they stand on certain things, what their pages look like, what their content looks like, how they interact with their audiences.”

“All those things are critical to help mitigate some of the things that can happen. Things can happen, but it’s really about a relationship. This person will represent your brand, so it’s about how in sync you are.”

Darren Hosang-Rudder, Sales and Marketing Director and co-founder of Restayge, an agency representing influencers, explained that brands must acknowledge that influencers have a voice and style that resonates with their audience and be ready to tailor their brand voice to meet audience expectations.

“We help brand managers, marketing managers, find the right people, discover the influencers, compare them, communicate with them, hire them, pay them.”

“For many that come to us, we are that support they need to use the influencers in the right way to get them to their outcomes and desired objectives for any particular campaign or promotion.”

“Influencers are a tool. They are an aspect of your marketing mix that you deploy for a particular outcome. They allow you to reach audiences really well, particularly if you define what that audience is prior to making new influencer selection.”

Hosang-Rudder noted that while some influencers are expensive, others are more affordable, explaining that some micro-influencers might be able to deliver appropriate reach for smaller MSME’s that don’t need responses from thousands of prospective clients.

“If you know how to find the ones that are right for your product, your service, your brand, or even the audience that you’re trying to reach. They are affordable, and they can get you to the person that you’re trying to reach. I use this analogy all the time. A villa owner in Tobago might not need 100 clients or 1000. They might need 15 for the first quarter of the year.”

What is the influencer’s role in the business landscape?

“When an influencer endorses a particular product,” Lawrence said, “what you get is the credibility that their audience has in them, but the influencer can’t manufacture trust.”

“You can use the credibility that they have, but once the consumer does that click, the actual journey starts with all the experience that they have with the product. The influencer may work, but once [the customer gets] to your product, what happens after that experience is where the real measure of success is.”

“As Caribbean people, we are great storytellers,” Muradali said.

“Influencers do well in the Caribbean because of the storytelling. We are able to tell stories really well, and it’s very entertaining. I think the entertainment aspect of it really has driven the use of influencers across the region.”

“To varying degrees, we’ve seen success with it, but it all comes down to relevance and authenticity in your choice of that voice. [Brand building should sit] with the marketing team and the organization, and influence is a tool that you can use, but at the end of the day, it’s all about how relevant that voice is to the audience and how authentic it is.”

What could possibly go wrong?

“The one thing I would say to small businesses is to see the influencers as more than just a media bank,” Lawrence said.

“Don’t just pay them to do one post or two posts. See them as a strategic partner and invest. It might seem [to be] a huge investment, but if you look at the long-term success of the partnership, it is worth it, because I think you do more harm than good by having them do just a short burst.

That opens it up for them to do something with their competitor, for them to get saturated. So you lock them into a partnership that is meaningful and as you scale, you can continue to leverage that partnership.”

“In particular industries, in particular verticals, in finance or in medicine and wellness, the risk is even greater,” Hosang-Rudder warned.

“The influencer may not always consistently align with the brand values in their organic messaging. That might be a risk as the brand continues to grow to gain momentum in the audience that they’re trying to speak to.”

“[Another risk] is too many is overlapping audiences. As an organization grows, they might deploy more influencers to reach different markets, different communities. They may have bigger budgets, and they want to double down on something that worked for them at a certain scale, but the influencers in a certain community, in a certain territory, might be talking to the same audience and therefore you don’t need to invest in all of them to
reach that audience.”

“The level of knowledge of an influencer or any voice in the purchase of a car or a house or getting medical services is very different from when you’re buying nuts or [operating] in the fast-moving consumer goods space or other categories like alcohol, going on a hike, or [evaluating] the best destinations in Trinidad and Tobago.”

“The influencer might give insight, and it might weigh in someone’s choice. But in other industries, that authenticity, that knowledge, that experience, that level of consistent delivery of information within the space becomes more important.”

“The risk is also there for the influencer because if they do endorse a product, especially those categories, and that product does not perform for their consumers, their followers, their audience, then they lose that audience’s trust.”

“They may lose followers, and they may lose engagement. Someone might not unfollow them, but they may not engage with their content in the future because that trust has been broken with the interaction of product that they endorsed. So that trust goes both ways.”

How do businesses incorporate influencers into their marketing mix?

Lisa-Ann Joseph, CEO of TT’s Reputation Management, described influencers as a “rented commodity” and urged companies to look inward for their brand ambassadors.

“I tend to push my clients in the direction of not outsourcing [brand building] as much as they can, and [work on] building the capacity internally so that the voice is heard from the internal audience, and it is done authentically.”

“We tend to not push our CEOs, not push our executives, not push our staff to be who we think they should be, which are the brand ambassadors, because they know the business, they know the products and services.”

“You have to really trust in this influencer to represent your brand, to be an advocate, to be the voice of your brand,” Griffith said.

“That will require an extensive amount of briefing and instruction and guidance, but before that, your selection process as well and the screening will need to be very stringent to ensure that whoever you select can represent the brand in the way that you want in an authentic way.”

“We invest a great deal of time and resources searching the influencer market to determine who can be a great fit for the brand, for the client, in a way that is seamless and doesn’t seem forced. [If] the audience accepts, that’s the ultimate test. The audience will know, and they’re following the influencer for a reason. They’re fans. They believe in this person. They trust what [the influencer says].”

“Anything that’s communicated on behalf of a small business needs to come across in a very sincere way. So for us, that screening process, that evaluation process [is important] to interview influencers and be sure, be confident that they can represent you well.”

“It’s a lot easier to bring in influencers when [they are working with] specific products and services,” Joseph said.

“You can bring them in, go through the process with them. Onboard them specifically for those areas, but when you bring in an influencer on to speak on behalf of the organization, and especially the area that Im in, which is crisis communications, that’s where everything can fall to pieces, developing into a new crisis altogether.”

“A lot of organizations want to bring influencers in to speak on behalf of their corporate [executives] or to speak together with corporate entities and that continues to be an issue. You have to engage with them in a long-term partnership. Because if some of your staff cannot explain what you do as an organization, how do you expect an external person to come in and speak?

“CEOs and executives are not influencers, but persons of influence,” Hosang-Rudder said.

“There are some fundamentals that are really important from an influencer perspective. No matter who you are, you need to be able to communicate well.”

“You need to be able to understand that if you’re entering into a partnership or collaboration or to brand, you need to understand the assignment. You need to know what your role is in this execution, this campaign, and be able to execute it.”

“You need to be able to command your audience to stop scrolling and listen, because as a person of influence, as a creator, your job is to bring attention to the message.”

“There are about 100 million posts going up every day, just on Instagram. People are not going to be able to consume all the content, even in their view. Your role is to get people to listen, to understand, and to have that unique relationship.”