Is Your Bank as Agile as a Pizza Influencer?

The rise of the pizza influencer as a career reveals a chasm between what bankers know & don't know about products & customers. Your bank's ability to innovate depends on leaping across that chasm.

Photo by Vit Ch on Unsplash

I can’t stop thinking about pizza influencers.

For years, even as I explained it to them over and over again, my parents did not understand what I did as a Gartner analyst. But over the years I would get the same 2 questions:

1) My mother or father would read an article in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post that mentioned a Gartner analyst and one of them would ask me “Do you know X? He works at Gartner.” It was almost always a him and I usually didn’t.

2) “Is X Bank was a good stock to buy?” I declined, of course, because hello SEC.

My point? My job was a new job, one that didn’t exist when she and my father were kids or when they entered the job market or throughout most of their careers. They didn’t understand what I did all day -- except that they were pretty proud of clippings I sent them that showed that I was quoted in an article. They lived most of their lives pretty sure that either law school or medical school would have been a better, more stable choice.

The Rise of Pizza Influencers

Which brings me to pizza influencers.

Back in the day, when everyone read paper newspapers & magazines and watched the 5 or 6 pm news on television, restaurant reviews in those mediums made or broke restaurants.

This is no longer true.

The week after a local food influencer ate at, photographed and posted about the restaurant where my son works, that restaurant added 11,000 Instagram followers. They had to implement a reservation system for the weekends. Every time this influencer features the restaurant – best new places to eat brunch, new black-owned restaurants, etc., they get even more followers – and more importantly, more customers. Sure the local paper mentioned the restaurant in a column and that helped give them visibility – to the people who still read newspaper reviews. But the influencer? That’s a different story.

After watching this happen at my son’s restaurant (cook, not owner), I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn about the rise of a new career: pizza influencer.

But I was. Like my parents and my analyst job, I had no idea that this job existed and knew even less about the scope of the influencer job/career.

On the surface, the influencer takes a lot of photos and videos and posts them everywhere.

A visit by Mirabelli, who roams Northeastern Pennsylvania in search of the area’s best pies and creates videos about his experiences, can boost a pizzeria’s business with a single post, thanks to his audience of more than 17,600 followers on Instagram, 22,000-plus followers on Facebook and 3,123 followers on TikTok. Source: Top Pizza Influencers

Pizza influencers, like other influencers, are not just reviewers. They don’t just create videos and post them. They have created new sources of revenue:

He's sponsored by companies that make pizza cutters, pizza "peels" (metal paddles for transferring pies to the oven) and baking equipment — and gets free product from a flour company and other ingredient makers.

His subscription channel, which offers pizza-making tutorials and recipes, has drawn a fast-growing number of paying viewers, including one household-name actress.

"There's a couple of companies that want to send me pizza ovens, but I had to turn them down because I can't have wood, fire or gas at my apartment," says Aydan (who refers to himself as a "pizzatarian"). Source: New career on the rise

Influencers have moved video and social media to revenue streams, sponsorships and other non-internet-based opportunities. No, they aren’t journalists and they don’t follow the same (if any) ethical codes that journalists do - like taking pizza cutters from suppliers.  Pizza influencers & their followers know they aren’t journalists.

This job didn’t exist before YouTube and TikTok (well, let’s face it, mostly TikTok).

Innovation Requires You Go Beyond What You Know

In previous issues, I have urged bankers & vendors to look beyond the commoditized banking and payments services, beyond their traditional demographic customer segmentation, to invent new products and services that cross siloes, demographic lines, and address needs of customers who sit at those new intersections.

The rise of the pizza influencer career connected a two ideas for me:

• Innovation isn’t delivering the same product or service, faster, shinier or with a new brand.

• The chasm between what you already know and what you don't know is one your bank and vendors must cross to innovate and create new revenue. You have to cross this chasm not when you completely understand what you don't know - but because that's where the new ideas – the new customers - are.

I don't pretend to understand how pizza influencers actually make a living around pizza. But, the distance from my lack of understanding and someone who does work as a pizza influencer is about 2 people. I posted a link to the Axios article to my personal Facebook feed and a couple of people immediately commented that they knew someone who worked as pizza influencers. 

When I think about how pizza influencers (and other influencers) are creating new careers and new revenue streams, I viewed them against innovation in the banking world.

• Compare this career innovation to many digital banking solutions that focus on delivering commoditized banking and payments transactions and services and core banking solutions that lock the financial institution into commoditized bank products for all types of retail/SMB/corporate customers.

• Compare this innovation to the innovations offered by many challenger or neo-banks - well-designed mobile apps (and goodness knows I’m not knocking those), less friction to open an account or pay a bill and credit & debit cards with more or different rewards but in the end, the same APR.

• Compare pizza influencers who appeal to pizza fans - which crosses all traditional demographic segments - to the way your financial institution continues to segment your customers – and prospective customers – the same way you always have.

(Note: If you don’t already know, there are a lot of personal finance influencers out there on every social medium you can think of and probably of some you have never heard of. Sure these influencers may not have any official qualifications, but many of your customers and the coveted Gen X and Z and Alpha (those under 18) customers are watching them.  I leave it up to your financial institution or organization to decide whether you should sponsor one of these influencers or otherwise use influencers? As you all well know, financial services is a regulated industry and giving advice is especially risky.)

Consider too that all the other food niches - and let me tell you there are food niches you've never heard of on TikTok and all the other areas for which influencers thrive?

• Does your FI understand the banking and payment needs of these hidden tribes?

• Can your delivery and core and data solutions help you make that leap across the chasm? 

Takeaways:

Understand the truth behind successful pizza influencers:

• There are lots of influencers. Axios linked to an article that references 73 top pizza influencers.

• There are many failed influencers. Even the Kardashians fail sometimes.

• The final product may look perfect but the path to it is not. Younger people know this and that is part of their enjoyment.

Becoming a successful influencer sounds an awful lot like agile innovation:

• Invent new ideas, products and services. Don’t rely on revisions of what you’ve already done, what already exists.

• Expect to fail a lot and learn from each failure.

• Adapt to and adopt new tools, techniques quickly. Toss out what doesn’t work for you. Open tools and solutions will help you adapt to the future – to customers you don’t yet know about, much less understand.

• Be authentic. Copying someone else won’t necessarily be successful for your bank.

• Keep inventing, over and over.

• Keep failing.

Sure, the Kardashians fail sometimes but does that stop them?

If you made it this far, here’s the restaurant I mentioned above.

Who writes PivotAssets?

I’m an independent analyst, strategic advisor & consultant (& a former Gartner analyst). I’ve worked in and covered the banking industry for over 2 decades.

My aim is not to confirm what you know (and you are plenty smart!) but to challenge you & give you a fresh perspective & analysis on the transformation that is —and isn’t happening - in the industry.

How can I help you?

Want more insights and analysis on hidden tribes and leveraging your bank’s legacy? Need help positioning your digital banking solution or fintech to meet the demands of today’s banking environment? I have my own firm PivotAssets.

To collaborate with me - whether you want analysis of and feedback on your GTM strategy or sales presentation, write a piece of thought leadership relevant to your business, or want someone to organize and moderate a webinar series, podcast or panel, please contact me at stessa@pivotassets.co or via LinkedIn.

I’m also available for inquiry and strategy sessions via Third Eye Advisory.

Me, Elsewhere

Join me and a few others for the next episode of The Fintech Bookclub:

• I’m an expert advisor at Third Eye Advisory.

• Theodora Lau, Barb Maclean, Efi Pylarinou and collaborated on this unorthodox, diverse perspectives about financial services & the year to come.

• I spoke with Theodora Lau and Barb Maclean on their podcast One Vision about smart banking & hidden tribes.

• I moderated a great panel of folks for a conversation on innovation. We cut through the hype and share practical advice for making your digital transformation efforts pay off. We definitely talked about the importance of small innovations.

• How can banks be truly low friction? They must address friction everywhere. Otherwise innovation & digital transformation will elude them. In this report I identified the characteristic of a low friction bank and why legacy core banking and architectures don’t support it.

• What can the Kardashians teach your financial institution about partnerships and innovation? How can working with empathic fintechs help you identify niche groups (aka hidden tribes) and innovate. All this and more in this this ebook that you can download at Praxent or Nymbus.

• Adopt an Agile Digital Banking Platform: How bankers must have an agile digital banking platform to support both global and local trends and requirements to help them identify new niche markets that will drive innovation, create new value and increase profitability. In this report I identified a set of capabilities that a digital banking platform must have that will help take banks into a competitive future and urges banks to select a digital banking partner who shares their innovation, vision and support for new value creation.