The Facebook page of Deelish Bakery in Nelson

20 August 2026 | David | Sparks of Inspiration

Are you getting a fair slice of the pie in the new Influencer economy?

The rise of the influencer has given birth to a whole new way of being. It's a new kind of job and certainly a new kind of marketing. Influencers are here to stay, and have become an integral part of the crossover between the online world of social media, and the real world of people going about their busy lives.

How do you manage an influencer? Can you leverage their influence to your advantage? Lets dig into this meaty topic....

To put it simply it is Influencer Marketing is based on utilising the networks built up by popular or influential individuals to promote your business. On the surface this seems foreign and risky, but at the heart of it, all you are doing is aligning your business or product with another business (the influencer) that also has access and influence over your clients, and are actively speaking to them from a place of authenticity and / or entertainment.

There has been a fantastic case study to learn from recently in Nelson, with the arrival in the city of perhaps the most notable of Pie Reviewers active in New Zealand right now, Kosmos, the self proclaimed King of Pies.
Kosmos has an enormous following across multiple platforms, and his pie reviews get hundreds of thousands of views. He can absolutely direct a lot of eyeballs onto a business, for better or for worse.

So how do you control it? How can you leverage the rise of the influencer and use their influence to drive business success? It all comes down to one thing. Strategy. Mixed with a healthy serving of cunning! But more on all of this later. For now let's all look at Kosmos.

Check out that Facebook page. 246,000 Followers! That is a huge audience. On one platform. But wait there is more.....

He also runs a TikTok account with a casual 165,000 followers, Snapchat with another 56,000, however on Instagram he gets enormous engagement and view statistics, even though his Instagram account has only 144,000 followers, and even appears to have or be involved with an App all about pies!

This man is clearly very successfully running a social media empire all around the humble pie review. His weapons of choice are the immediate and more disposable content zones of Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, where basically the same content is uploaded to each platform.

He is talking to each of his audiences on the platforms that they prefer, and not flinching at the prospect of the same person seeing the same video across several different platforms in the same short space of time. There is a lesson there....

Now lets get to the meat of this deep dive into the world of pie reviews, collabs, sell outs and the Pied Piper - yes that one, just to keep it interesting.

When is a review more than an opinion?

The easy answer is when you have thousands and thousands of people consuming your content. It is no longer a review, it is now entertainment, it is art, and it is marketing. If I was in the Bakery business, I would be absolutely doing some research into the world of pie reviews, and the wider Bakery review content in general. Seriously, it is it's own genre. And it is a genre that gets millions of views globally, so there will always be people in that space going forward, trying to make a name and a career out of doing something that they love. I would want to know what I am dealing with, and how to make the most of a cultural zeitgeist. People like Kosmos not only pave the way, they also show others that it is possible to create a lifestyle out of reviewing pies, even in a small country like New Zealand.

If I didn't have a marketing brain I would be finding those that do and pay them for a strategy session to make sure that I can maximise the moment. Do it well and you will reap the rewards, and create long term customers you never knew you had. Pay no heed, and you will drop off the list of potential.

When Kosmos came to Nelson for a week, it wasn't a surprise. He posted content on the Bluebridge ferry. He even did a collaboration with them promoting their new Bluebridge pie option (click here to watch it), a mince and cheese (of course), and they set him up with his own Bluebridge hoody with his name embroidered on the back, so there must have been quite a bit of forward planning there.

He did the rounds of the local bakeries in Picton. He posted content in Havelock, the green shell mussel capital of the world, in his attempt to get a feed of mussels, which was surprisingly hard for him. That is where I caught wind of who he was, and the quest he was on. The video he made in Havelock ended up giving the local hotel featured a massive boom of new visitors looking for mussels over the following week. One of the hotel staff made a comment on another post in utter disbelief at how many people made the trip to Havelock especially to have the mussels at their local hotel. The video had a 176,000 views on Facebook; 258,000 views on Instagram; and 55,400 views on TikTok. That is a lot of eyeballs looking at the experience one person had at your business.

See the video on Facebook.

Some bakeries in Nelson were also paying attention and clearly knew he was coming and perhaps adjusted their pie offerings to cater for his specific quest - the perfect mince and double cheese pie in all of the land. Perhaps some already had that on the menu, perhaps some added the pie in anticipation of his visit. His reviews are basically all of the same format. He just rocks up with his side kick filming on their phone, and they just get into it. A bit of casual banter as he orders, and then outside with the business in the background to taste the pie and give it a rating. Seems simple, with little room for the business to engage, however some engage a lot better than others. This first point of contact is the perfect opportunity to set the tone, be engaging and even slip in some advanced self promotion. Some of the bakeries sell him the pie and then offer him to try their "signature item" as a bonus. Perfect. Everybody loves a freebie, and straight away that simple act puts him into a more positive frame of mind about your business. It also promotes additional range to his vast audience, some of whom will be in your region, and some who will take note for the next time they are in your area. It is amazing how impactful these moments are.

The next moment on his trip I really paid attention to was when people started commenting on a post made by a local bakery that they had sold out of pies because of the Kosmos review. So I strapped in and dug deep into the conversation. It was very enlightening, eye opening, and a great big confirmation in plain sight of what I have been telling some of my clients of late - pay attention to the shifting winds!

The Pied Piper.

We all know the story. The village of Hamelin is over run with rats. They cannot cope. They bring in the Pied Piper - a charismatic rat-catcher who uses a magical pipe to lure away a town's pests—and later, its children—as retribution for broken promises and payment not made. Recorded by famous literary figures like the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning, the tale apparently actually happened but is also surrounded heavily in historical lore. It is a fantastic lesson to all on so many different levels, and a shame that these kinds of stories are not the foundation of our educational experience any more. Much like the Emperors New Clothes, the Pied Piper is a fable perfect for our place and time.

Influencers are like modern day Pied Pipers. They really do have the ability to make or break a business, in the short term especially. The rise of the influencer economy has also meant that Influencers, and to some degree Content Creators in general, do need to be paid attention to. They definitely don't need to be bowed down to, but businesses do need to be aware of the power and impact that they have. Pay them no heed, or worse, create an enemy of an influencer, and you run the risk posed by the Pied Piper. They do actually have the ability to impact your bottom line, primarily by way of the volume of eyeballs that have influence over. In the 1980's Andy Warhol once famously said "in the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes" and this is entirely what the Influencer Economy thrives on. People watch the content, some secretly wishing that they could be the one "influencing", because "how hard could it be....???"

The Influencer Impact.

So back in the real world, Kosmos rolls into town doing the rounds of the various bakeries. He stops by Deelish Bakery in Tahunanui, Nelson. Like always he tags them in the description. They now know if they didn't already. The video has 137,000 views on Facebook, 214,000 on Instagram, and 65,700 on TikTok. On Facebook right now the post is shared 38 times, has 2000 likes and nearly 200 comments.

The Deelish Facebook page when I got to it a day after the Kosmos review had 900+ followers. How much growth had they achieved in between the review and the time I got to it? Now several weeks later they have 1400+ followers. That is a significant growth rate for a small business, and they're now over the magic number of Kevin Kelly's 1000 True fans. If you are not familiar with this concept we will dive into that at some point. From the perspective of marketing, they are winning right now. But it is on the ground where it all gets more exciting. Actual cold hard cash in the till. There is nothing better than seeing small business succeed. This is the hard work, risk and investment a person has made to offer a part of themselves into their local community. It is not easy. But if you turn up, do the hard yards and commit to your craft, good things do happen. Over the next couple of days Deelish shared some fantastic posts. Biggest week that they have ever had. Let that sink in!

Look at the numbers on the bottom of the Deelish Posts. The first one had 2000 Likes and 12 shares. What a result. The proof is in the pudding, or pie as the case may be in this instance. Sold out. Not just of pies, but of everything. They literally ran out of food. Best outcome ever. The question now is how do you tame this beast?

We have been working with influencers and content creators since 2012 - 2013 when it became apparent that this was going to be a future way to engage with audiences on behalf of our clients. We know the landscape. We know how to wrangle them, lock down realistic goals and expectations, but most importantly keep everything honest, transparent and flowing. There are certainly some specialised skills required when treading these paths! Like I said earlier, the key is a strategy. The key is knowing your market, knowing your business and knowing what is happening around you in the "marketing spaces". Sometimes a view from the outside can be very beneficial and give you a perspective you never knew was so important. If this is the first time visiting our website, and you have made it to this point Thank you very much, welcome, take a look around and get to know us.