The Creator Economy Is Changing How Brands Build Trust

INDUSTRY AND COMPETITIVE CONTEXT

The relationship between brands and consumers has undergone a structural realignment in the past decade, driven not by a single platform or campaign, but by a fundamental shift in who consumers trust to tell them what to buy and why. The rise of the creator economy, broadly defined as the ecosystem of independent digital content creators who build audiences and monetize them through brand partnerships, platform revenue, and direct commerce, represents one of the most consequential disruptions in marketing since the arrival of television advertising.

According to Goldman Sachs Research, the creator economy was valued at approximately $250 billion in 2023, with projections suggesting the total addressable market could approach $480 billion by 2027, roughly doubling within five years. Goldman Sachs attributed this growth to increased digital media consumption, lower barriers to content creation facilitated by accessible technology, and the emergence of short-form video formats across platforms including TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. These structural factors did not merely expand a marketing channel; they redistributed cultural authority away from traditional institutions and brand advertisers and toward individual creators who had earned the attention and trust of niche communities.

The influencer marketing sub-sector of this economy, which represents the portion directly measurable by brand expenditure, grew from $1.7 billion in 2016 to an estimated $24 billion in 2024, according to the Influencer Marketing Hub Benchmark Report 2024. The same report projected the market to reach approximately $32.55 billion in 2025, marking consistent double-digit annual growth across nearly a decade. This trajectory is not incidental. It reflects a deliberate and accelerating reallocation of marketing budgets from traditional mass media toward creator-led channels that demonstrably reach younger, digitally-native consumers with higher engagement rates and lower skepticism toward the medium.

The competitive implications for brands are significant. In a media environment where consumers have the ability to skip, mute, and block conventional advertising, earned credibility through authentic creator relationships has emerged as a meaningful source of competitive differentiation. Brands that successfully integrated creator partnerships into their core marketing strategy early have demonstrated both revenue growth and valuation outcomes that their more conventionally marketed competitors have struggled to match.

BRAND SITUATION PRIOR TO CREATOR STRATEGY

To understand how the creator economy changes brand trust, it is instructive to examine two documented cases that illustrate divergent starting points converging on a common strategic logic: Gymshark, a fitness apparel brand that was built almost entirely through creator partnerships from inception, and Dunkin', an established legacy brand that used a creator collaboration to reconnect with a demographic it was at risk of losing to more culturally agile competitors.

Gymshark was founded in 2012 by Ben Francis, then a 19-year-old university student in Birmingham, United Kingdom. The brand had no advertising budget, no retail distribution, and no media relationships. What it had was a genuine product for gym-goers at a time when the dominant sportswear incumbents, including Nike and Adidas, designed their marketing around professional athletes rather than everyday fitness communities. This gap between aspirational celebrity endorsement and relatable fitness lifestyle represented the opening through which Gymshark entered the market. The brand's early growth was funded entirely through bootstrapping, with no external capital until 2020.

Dunkin' occupied an entirely different position. A nationally recognised American coffee and food chain with decades of brand heritage, Dunkin' had successfully repositioned itself in 2019 by dropping the word "Donuts" from its name to signal a strategic pivot toward its beverage business. However, the brand faced a well-documented competitive challenge in attracting Generation Z consumers, a segment that Starbucks had cultivated through social media ubiquity, secret menu culture, and the personalisation narrative embedded in its cups and loyalty programme. Dunkin' needed a credibility signal within the social media environment that its heritage brand identity alone could not provide.

These two situations, one a brand with no legacy but unlimited flexibility, and one a heritage brand with established awareness but declining cultural relevance with younger cohorts, both arrived at the same strategic answer: authentic creator partnerships built on genuine affinity rather than transactional endorsement.

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE

The strategic objective in both cases, though shaped by different competitive circumstances, centred on the same fundamental challenge in modern marketing: building trust with audiences that have learned to distrust advertising. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2024 documented that 84 percent of consumers globally stated they only purchase from brands that share their values, while 60 percent reported buying or boycotting brands as a form of values expression. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on Brand Trust found that 73 percent of people said their trust in a brand would increase if it authentically reflected current culture, while only 27 percent said their trust would increase when brands focused solely on product communication and ignored cultural connection. These findings are not peripheral data points; they reframe the central task of brand marketing from awareness generation to credibility construction.

For Gymshark, the objective was to build brand credibility within the fitness community from a zero base by borrowing trust from creators who had already earned it. For Dunkin', the objective was to translate existing brand familiarity into cultural relevance within the TikTok generation by associating with a creator whose audience affinity for the brand predated any commercial relationship. In both instances, the trust mechanism being activated was not aspiration or authority, as traditional celebrity endorsements operate, but rather relatability and documented genuine preference.

CAMPAIGN ARCHITECTURE AND EXECUTION

Gymshark's approach to creator marketing was architecturally distinct from standard influencer campaigns in that it operated as a long-term brand-building strategy rather than a campaign with a defined start and end date. From its earliest years, Ben Francis identified fitness creators on YouTube and Instagram, most of them with audiences in the tens of thousands rather than millions, and provided them with product in exchange for authentic content creation. The brand explicitly targeted creators who were genuine members of the fitness community rather than lifestyle generalists, reasoning that community credibility required community membership. Gymshark later formalised this approach through what it called its "Gymshark Athletes" programme, a roster of fitness creators who were positioned as brand representatives rather than paid spokespeople, with the distinction being that their relationships with the brand were presented as earned and genuine.

By the time of the General Atlantic investment in August 2020, Gymshark had assembled a social media community of more than 12 million followers across its own brand accounts, a figure that reflected the compound effect of years of creator-generated content that reached audiences the brand itself could not have accessed through paid media alone. The brand reported revenues of over £250 million for the fiscal year ending July 2020, having achieved this without any traditional advertising spend of significance throughout most of its history.

Dunkin's approach was structurally different because its context required a specific, time-bounded intervention rather than a sustained programme. Charli D'Amelio had been posting videos on TikTok with a Dunkin' cold brew as a visible and frequently noted element of her content, without any commercial arrangement with the brand. This organic association was both an asset and a strategic prompt. Dunkin' recognised that D'Amelio's documented, unpaid affinity for the brand represented exactly the kind of authentic creator relationship that money could not manufacture. The strategic decision was therefore not to create an association but to formalise one that already existed in the cultural record, thereby preserving the authenticity that gave the partnership its trust value.

On September 2, 2020, Dunkin' issued a formal press release announcing the partnership. The company permanently named D'Amelio's regular order, a medium cold brew with whole milk and three pumps of caramel swirl, as a named menu item called "The Charli," making it available at all Dunkin' restaurants nationwide and through the Dunkin' mobile app. The campaign was extended through a social media contest inviting fans to recreate iconic Charli and Dunkin' moments, an exclusive song, and a DD Perks loyalty programme integration that offered bonus rewards to customers who ordered The Charli through the app. The architecture embedded the creator partnership not just in social content but in product, loyalty mechanics, and mobile commerce, using the creator relationship as an activation layer across multiple consumer touchpoints simultaneously.

POSITIONING AND CONSUMER INSIGHT

The positioning logic underlying both cases reflects a sophisticated consumer insight that runs counter to the assumptions embedded in traditional brand advertising. Conventional advertising operates on the premise that consumers are persuaded by polished, authoritative communication originating from the brand itself. Creator economy marketing operates on a different premise: that consumers distrust communication from brands by default, and that the most credible brand signals are those that originate from trusted individuals who happen to like the brand, rather than from the brand itself.

This insight is particularly acute for Generation Z, the cohort that came of age during a period of widespread institutional distrust and that conducts its discovery, evaluation, and purchasing of products primarily within social platforms where creator content dominates. For this cohort, a brand that appears in a creator's content as a genuine element of that creator's lifestyle carries substantially more trust weight than a brand that purchases advertising space on the same platform.

Gymshark applied this insight at the level of identity construction, positioning itself not as a sportswear brand selling product but as a community platform for people serious about fitness, with the creators functioning as community anchors who gave the brand's cultural positioning specificity and credibility. Dunkin' applied it at the level of social proof, using the documented evidence that TikTok's most-followed creator genuinely chose to drink their cold brew as a signal of authenticity that the brand alone could not manufacture. The Charli product made that social proof tangible, converting a creator's expressed preference into a purchasable item that allowed consumers to participate in the same cultural moment.

MEDIA AND CHANNEL STRATEGY

Gymshark's channel strategy was built on YouTube and Instagram from approximately 2012 to 2018, with a deliberate expansion into TikTok as that platform's fitness content community grew. The brand's creator partnerships generated content that was distributed through the creators' own channels rather than Gymshark's owned media, which meant that the brand's marketing reach was not constrained by the size of its own following but was instead determined by the aggregate audiences of its creator network. This structural distinction between owned media reach and earned media reach, via creator networks, is central to understanding why creator-led brands can achieve disproportionate market presence relative to their marketing expenditure.

Dunkin' anchored its creator strategy to TikTok for the 2020 campaign, reflecting both D'Amelio's primary platform and the strategic imperative of demonstrating relevance to a generation that had largely migrated its social media activity away from Facebook and toward short-form video. The Dunkin' app served as the commerce layer, with the loyalty programme integration creating a direct behavioural incentive that connected social engagement to measurable commercial activity. This channel integration, from TikTok content to app download to in-store or mobile order, represented a more sophisticated architecture than a simple product endorsement and allowed the brand to measure the commercial impact of the creator relationship with greater precision than traditional influencer campaigns.

BUSINESS AND BRAND OUTCOMES

The business outcomes associated with both creator strategies are documented in public sources, though it is important to note that the causal relationship between creator marketing and financial performance is multifactorial and should be interpreted with appropriate analytical care.

Gymshark's trajectory from a bootstrapped startup to a documented unicorn is directly attributable in structural terms to its creator-first marketing model, which was the only significant marketing investment the brand made for most of its growth period. In August 2020, General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm, announced a strategic partnership that valued Gymshark at over £1 billion, making it only the second British company since 2001 to achieve unicorn status without prior external investment. The company's revenues at the time of investment exceeded £250 million. General Atlantic's press release explicitly noted the brand's community-building strategy and social media following of over 12 million as core assets being valued in the transaction. The valuation represented institutional recognition that a creator-built brand community constitutes a durable and scalable competitive asset.

For Dunkin', the publicly documented outcomes of The Charli campaign are more specific and time-bounded. Dunkin' reported that the campaign produced a 57 percent increase in downloads of the Dunkin' mobile app in the first day following the launch, a metric the company had been actively working to improve through other initiatives. Dunkin' further documented a 20 percent increase in cold brew sales on the day The Charli debuted, and a 45 percent increase in cold brew sales the following day. The campaign was subsequently described through trade coverage as the most successful product launch in Dunkin's history at that time, a characterisation consistent with the scale of the documented engagement and sales impact. The partnership was later extended with additional product launches and a merchandise collaboration, indicating that Dunkin' regarded the initial campaign outcomes as commercially sufficient to warrant continued investment in the creator relationship.

STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS

The documented evidence from these cases, and from the broader market data on creator economy growth, supports several strategic conclusions that have direct implications for how brands approach trust-building in contemporary marketing.

The first implication is that trust cannot be purchased directly; it must be borrowed or earned. Creator economy marketing is effective precisely because it converts the pre-existing trust between creators and their audiences into brand credibility, but only when the creator relationship is perceived as genuine. The Dunkin' case illustrates this with particular clarity: D'Amelio's unpaid, organic promotion of Dunkin' cold brew was the entire trust foundation upon which the paid partnership was built. A manufactured partnership with a creator who had no documented prior relationship with the brand would have yielded neither the same authenticity signal nor, in all probability, the same commercial outcome.

The second implication concerns the long-term architecture of brand building. Gymshark's trajectory demonstrates that creator partnerships, structured as community investments rather than transactional campaigns, can serve as the primary growth engine for a brand, substituting for conventional advertising with superior outcomes in brand trust, consumer loyalty, and community density. This is not simply a cost-efficiency argument; it is a structural argument about where durable brand equity resides in the current consumer environment.

The third implication addresses the democratisation of brand building. The creator economy has substantially lowered the minimum viable marketing investment required to build a credible brand, because the distribution infrastructure, in the form of creator audiences, is accessible to brands willing to invest in genuine creator relationships rather than purchased reach. This changes the competitive dynamics of brand building in ways that traditional market analysis, which weights established brands heavily for their advertising scale advantages, may systematically underestimate.

The fourth implication concerns measurement and attribution. The creator economy presents a persistent measurement challenge for brands accustomed to the comparative predictability of paid media attribution. The Dunkin' case is relatively unusual in providing specific publicly disclosed metrics that allow direct assessment of campaign impact. Most creator economy outcomes are measured through a combination of brand tracking, social listening, and commercial data that individual companies rarely disclose publicly. This opacity makes academic analysis difficult and underscores the need for brands to develop robust internal measurement frameworks that capture the full commercial impact of creator partnerships across brand, engagement, and revenue dimensions.

The fifth and perhaps most consequential strategic implication is that consumer trust has become a quantified competitive variable rather than a soft brand aspiration. The Edelman Trust Barometer data documents with statistical specificity that consumers are making purchase and avoidance decisions based on trust assessments of brands. In this environment, creator economy marketing is not a tactical channel choice; it is a strategic response to the structural conditions of contemporary consumer markets.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR MBA SEMINARS

1. Gymshark achieved unicorn status with no external investment and minimal traditional advertising by building its brand entirely through creator partnerships. To what extent is this model replicable for brands operating in product categories where creator communities are less developed or where regulatory constraints on product claims limit creator content flexibility?

2. The strategic value of the Dunkin' and Charli D'Amelio partnership rested on the documented authenticity of D'Amelio's organic preference for the brand before any commercial relationship existed. How should brand strategists identify and evaluate pre-existing organic creator affinity at scale, and what governance mechanisms should be in place to ensure that the formalisation of such relationships does not undermine the authenticity that gives them their trust value?

3. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2025 found that 73 percent of consumers say their trust in a brand increases when it authentically reflects current culture, while only 27 percent say trust increases when brands focus solely on product claims. How should this finding reshape the allocation of marketing investment between product-focused communication and culturally-embedded creator partnerships, and what are the risks of over-indexing on cultural relevance at the expense of product salience?

4. The creator economy's growth is concentrated on platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube that are subject to regulatory scrutiny, ownership uncertainty, and algorithmic change outside the control of brand strategists. How should brands structure their creator economy investments to manage platform dependency risk while maintaining the community intimacy that makes creator marketing effective?

5. The documented outcomes of creator economy marketing, including Gymshark's valuation trajectory and Dunkin's app download and sales data, suggest that brand trust built through creator communities generates measurable commercial value. How should Chief Marketing Officers make the case to CFOs and boards for creator economy investment when the attribution models are less standardised than those used for paid digital media, and when the trust-building outcomes operate over longer time horizons than conventional campaign metrics capture?