Asia-Pacific creator economy study tracks 340 game-changing product claims across 18 months and finds the games in question remain unchanged while the products have in several cases been quietly discontinued
Influencer Report: 94 Percent of Game-Changing Products Have Not Changed Any Identifiable Game
SINGAPORE — The Asia-Pacific Creator Economy Research Institute released a study Wednesday tracking 340 product claims made by paid influencers across seven markets over an 18-month period, focusing specifically on products described using the phrase “game-changing” or its functional equivalents — “life-changing,” “revolutionary,” “the only product you’ll ever need,” and “I literally cannot believe I lived without this” — and assessing whether, 18 months after the claim, the game in question had changed. In 94 percent of the 340 cases, the game had not changed. In 4 percent of cases, the game had changed due to factors unrelated to the product. In 2 percent of cases, the product had produced a genuine, documented change in the consumer’s relationship with the activity the product addressed, a result the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Mei Lin Ooi, described as “the actual game-change rate, which is 2 percent, which the language of ‘game-changing’ does not suggest.”
“We are not arguing that influencer marketing does not work,” Dr. Ooi said at a Singapore briefing attended by 40 brand managers who commission influencer campaigns and 20 creators who produce them, a group whose combined body language the briefing’s observers described as “professionally attentive.” “Influencer marketing demonstrably affects purchase decisions. What we are studying is the relationship between the language used in these campaigns and the outcomes those campaigns describe. ‘Game-changing’ is a claim. Claims can be assessed. We assessed 340 of them. The assessment produced a specific number, which is 2 percent, and which we believe is information that both the industry and consumers would find useful.”
What the 340 Products Were and What Happened to Them
The 340 tracked products covered eight categories, with the highest concentration in skincare and beauty (87 products), kitchen and home organization (64 products), fitness and wellness (58 products), and productivity tools (41 products). The game-change assessment evaluated each product against five criteria 18 months after the influencer claim: whether the consumer who purchased it still used it; whether it had been repurchased after the initial purchase; whether the consumer described it as having changed their routine, behavior, or capability in a meaningful way; whether the consumer would recommend it to a close friend without a financial incentive; and whether the product was still available for purchase. On criterion five alone, 23 percent of the 340 products had been discontinued within 18 months of the campaign, a result Dr. Ooi described as “the finding that most surprised us, since game-changing products are not typically products whose manufacturers stop making them within a year and a half of the game being changed.”
The most comprehensively studied category was skincare, where the study tracked 87 products described as game-changing across claims including “the only moisturiser you’ll ever need,” “this completely transformed my skin,” and “I’ve tried everything and this is the one.” At 18 months, 61 percent of the influencers who had made these claims were no longer using the product as part of their posted skincare routine, a fact determinable from their subsequent content. Forty-four percent had in that period promoted a different product using similar language. The study documents one influencer who had, in the 18-month tracking period, described three different sunscreens as “the only sunscreen I will ever use,” a claim whose logical structure requires resolution that the influencer’s content did not provide.
The Language Ecosystem
The institute conducted a separate linguistic analysis of 4,200 paid posts across the same period, cataloguing the specific hyperbolic phrases used and their frequency. “Game-changing” appeared in 23 percent of posts. “Life-changing” appeared in 19 percent. “Obsessed” appeared in 34 percent, making it the most common hyperbolic descriptor, and one that Dr. Ooi noted had “undergone significant semantic devaluation,” since its original psychological meaning — a compulsive preoccupation interfering with daily function — was clearly not applicable in the context of a face wash. The phrase “I literally cannot believe” appeared in 18 percent of posts, and the study notes that the consumer’s ability to believe the thing in question was rarely in genuine doubt at the time of posting.
The language analysis found consistent escalation over the study period: phrases used in 2022 were on average 23 percent shorter and 34 percent less superlative than equivalent phrases in 2024, as the competitive pressure of the attention economy drove individual posts toward increasingly extreme claims to achieve the differentiation that milder claims no longer provided. Dr. Ooi said this was “a documented inflation dynamic in persuasion language” and that “once ‘great’ stops meaning great and ‘amazing’ stops meaning amazing, the language needs to escalate to ‘life-changing’ and ‘revolutionary’ to achieve the response that ‘great’ and ‘amazing’ previously produced, at which point ‘life-changing’ and ‘revolutionary’ begin their own devaluation cycle.”
What Brands and Creators Said
The institute shared findings with eight brands whose products appeared in the tracked data. Three provided responses. All three noted that influencer campaign effectiveness was measured by engagement, reach, and conversion, not by 18-month product continuation rates. One brand’s marketing director said the game-change metric was “not how brand success is typically assessed in the creator economy context” and that “consumer satisfaction over an 18-month period is a valuable metric but not the one that the campaign ROI framework uses.” Dr. Ooi confirmed this was an accurate description of the measurement framework and said it was “precisely the thing the study is examining, since a campaign that succeeds on engagement and conversion metrics while promoting products with a 2 percent 18-month continuation rate is optimising for a different outcome than the one the campaign language describes.”
Four creators whose content was tracked agreed to speak without attribution. All four said they believed in the products they promoted “at the time of posting.” All four said the volume of product partnerships in the creator economy made long-term product loyalty “difficult to maintain commercially.” Two said they had felt uncomfortable with specific claims they had been asked to make and had negotiated the language “where possible.” One said “the brief comes with the language sometimes and you use it or you don’t take the campaign,” a description of the production chain of hyperbole that Dr. Ooi confirmed was “consistent with the study’s understanding of how the language gets into the content.” The 2 percent game-change rate, she confirmed, was “not a judgment on creators as individuals but a measurement of a system in which the incentives for accurate language and the incentives for effective language are not the same.”
