From Horses to Cockroaches: Why marketing needs better metaphors for the creator economy

Guest Column: Ajay Kulkarni, Director-Growth Barcode Entertainment, writes that the creator economy needs a new language to define creators by their influence, not just their follower count

by Ajay Kulkarni
Published: Jul 24, 2026 9:36 AM | 3 min read

The article reflects on the use of metaphors in marketing and business, emphasizing how they can effectively convey complex ideas and enhance understanding.
It critiques the current categorization of creators in the economy, which focuses primarily on follower counts rather than the roles they play in influencing audiences.
The author suggests that as the creator economy matures, it should develop its own terminology to better describe the functions of creators, proposing terms like "Igniters," "Navigators," "Validators," "Community Builders," and "Cultural Architects."
The piece concludes that effective marketing is rooted in the ideas that resonate with people, rather than just the campaigns themselves, highlighting the importance of meaningful language in the industry.

Some books stay with you long after you've forgotten the actual chapters. I picked up Jack Trout and Al Ries's Horse Sense years ago, and what stuck wasn't the content so much as the trick of it using horses, cats, dogs, whatever, as stand-ins for how businesses compete and position themselves and, honestly, survive. Stuff that could've filled an entire MBA semester got compressed into something you could picture. That was probably my first real lesson in what language does for an idea.

The best marketers aren't the ones who explain things best. They're the ones who hand you a metaphor you can't put down.

I had a similar moment watching Narcos, of all things. The word "cockroach" comes up not as an insult, but almost as doctrine. A cockroach survives. It adapts, vanishes when things get dangerous, comes back the second it's safe. One word, and the writers had basically summarized an entire theory of resilience.

Which got me thinking about our own industry.

Every era of business seems to invent its own vocabulary to keep up with itself. Finance had bulls and bears long before anyone remembers. Tech gave us unicorns, then decacorns, because apparently one mythical horse wasn't enough. Marketing has always leaned on metaphor for the same reason it's just easier to hold onto an image than a paragraph of explanation.

So maybe it's time the creator economy grew its own language too, instead of borrowing ours.

Right now we sort creators into mega, macro, micro, nano and sure, that's useful, up to a point. But it's a headcount, not a description. It tells you how many eyeballs someone can pull, not what they actually do once they've got them.

I've seen a creator with maybe 20,000 followers move more product than someone sitting on two million. I've seen another who'll never sell a single unit but somehow shapes what an entire category thinks is cool. Someone else becomes the person everyone quietly trusts to explain things properly. And then there's the person whose whole value is just... starting the argument.

Follower count is a measure of reach. It says nothing about role.

I think as this industry matures we'll need words that describe what a creator does, not just how big their audience is. A few I keep coming back to:

Igniters the ones who get a conversation moving in the first place.

Navigators : they take something complicated and make it make sense.

Validators : the ones who show up right before a purchase and quietly remove your last doubt.

Community Builders : they're still there long after the campaign's technically over.

And then, rarer, the Cultural Architects : not people who ride a trend, but the ones who actually set it in motion.

That's a more useful way to think about influence than another spreadsheet of follower counts.

The creator economy has stopped being an experiment. It's turning into one of the more sophisticated disciplines marketing has produced in a while and every discipline like that eventually earns its own language.

Maybe that's the next chapter for us.

Because marketing was never really about the campaigns. It's about the ideas people actually keep. And every so often, those ideas start with something as unlikely as a horse. Or a cockroach.