How do gastro-influencers think?

There is no doubt that companies can no longer ignore online opinion leaders when planning their marketing campaigns. Several technical articles, researches, and workshops deal with how manufacturers and traders should act when selecting and commissioning influenza agents, but we know less about how gastro-influenza agents think about the market, how consciously they shape their market activity. Since the majority are not professional media or marketers, it is interesting to learn about their experience in the market, the applied marketing work, and the way of handling market information.

In the course of our qualitative research, we conducted 11 online in-depth interviews (table 1), says Mária Törőcsik, with key actors active in the digital market of gastrocommunications about their marketing communication and data analysis habits, as well as their knowledge of their own audience. During the interviews, we focused on the subjects’ way of thinking and their operational processes. The subjects defined their market through open-ended questions, characterizing, among other things, its seasonality, the current technological environment and the importance of the role of visuality. Among the interviewees, there are those whose main profile is sharing recipes on YouTube, there are those who we know from the television screen, there are also actors who have achieved a significant number of followers on Instagram and TikTok, and there are those whose gastroblogging is your main profile. Two of the in-depth interview subjects are full-time bloggers, they only work on their own platforms, which is their main source of livelihood. Four people are full-time self-employed in the sector, they also undertake activities outside of their own platforms for other actors operating in the given market, e.g. marketing, product photography, article writing. This is not the main source of livelihood for five additional persons, they are primarily employed in other sectors. Among the social media platforms, all the subjects can be found on Instagram, three of them regularly create content for YouTube, and another four have channels, and all but two of them can be found on TikTok. Three of the five most popular Instagrammers represent traditional Hungarian cuisine, one person represents professional confectionery and one person’s profile combines tradition and trends.