Beyond Influence: Why Expertise Beats Popularity | Eric Sheinkop

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Why Consumer Trust Is the Next Big Business Opportunity

Traditional influencer marketing is losing its impact as consumers demand real expertise over paid endorsements. This episode explores how businesses can build trust by leveraging credible professionals instead of relying on popularity alone. We also discuss the evolution of thought leadership and how creating valuable content—like white papers and books—can open doors and establish authority.

Is the influencer model broken? Consumers are drowning in five-star reviews and paid endorsements. But what if credibility, not clout, was the real driver of influence?

In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick sits down with Eric Shienkop, entrepreneur, author, and tech innovator. Eric built the world’s largest community of unsigned musicians, helping them monetize their work through brand partnerships. Now, he’s taking on another industry ripe for disruption—online reviews and influencer marketing.

Eric’s company, The Desire Company, is flipping the script. Instead of influencers with massive followings but little expertise, they partner with professionals—athletes, doctors, and industry specialists—who actually know their stuff. The result?  Trustworthy product recommendations that resonate with consumers in a way traditional influencer marketing no longer does.

Eric shares the evolution of his thought leadership journey, from struggling to get into boardrooms to becoming a bestselling author and sought-after speaker. He breaks down the steps that took him from white papers to keynotes to writing the book “Return of the Hustle: The Art of Marketing With Music” that made Microsoft come calling.

If you’re trying to cut through the noise, establish credibility, and build a business that thrives on trust, this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

Three Key Takeaways

Credibility Beats Popularity – Consumers are growing skeptical of traditional influencer marketing, making expert-driven recommendations more valuable than ever.

Thought Leadership Opens Doors – Writing books, publishing white papers, and speaking at events can transform expertise into opportunities and business growth.

Industries Ripe for Disruption – Outdated systems, like the current review and influencer models, create opportunities for innovation and trust-based marketing.

Eric shows why getting the right influencer is more important than the one with the most followers. If you want to follow in his footsteps you’ll have to know your audience, and not just in general terms. Check out this article by Peter Winick on how to clearly describe your ideal client and why being able to do so is critical.

 

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Eric Shine Cup. He’s an accomplished entrepreneur. He’s an acclaimed author, a tech innovator known for bringing innovative solutions to antiquated industries. His journey began with a passion for music and a drive to create opportunities for underserved communities. He founded a platform that became the world’s largest community of unsigned musicians, enabling them to monetize their music through brand partnerships, TV and film placements. This platform helped independent music artist earn $15 million, significantly impacting their lives and careers. He’s also the co-founder of the Desire Company, and he has garnered prestigious recognitions, including features in the Billboard’s 30 Under 30, Crain’s Tech 50, and a whole bunch of other cool things. So welcome aboard today, Eric. Cool stuff.

Eric Shienkop Thank you very much, Peter. It’s great to be here.

Peter Winick Yeah. So tell me how your journey as a fall leader started. Obviously it was very planned, deliberate and logical and linear, I would say.

Eric Shienkop Yeah, right. Like everything in this business. No, it was. It was very organic. It was very much out of a frustration because there wasn’t an answer or solution for what I was looking for. And it really it really started the initial thing was that I did a graduate program in music production, engineering management, and then at the graduation, it was a hero of mine who was giving the speech and he was telling all these wonderful stories about the music industry and flying on planes with Led Zeppelin and all these wonderful, you know, experiences. And he said, But I don’t know what to tell you. That was before the Internet. There’s no real money in the music business anymore. I would think of it more as a hobby. And this is, you know, he’s given that speech to a room of kids who have dedicated their life and money to learn it. So at that moment, I realized like, they’re not going to solve the issues of the music industry, of the entertainment industry, of the advertising industry. We are going to be the ones to solve. We understand the nuances of the Internet to interact. And so it was at that moment that at least it became clear to me that we have the opportunity to create new ideas and bring them to market to help brands, you know, achieve their mission, whether it’s connect to the consumer, sell more products, whatever it might be, in more meaningful ways than had previously existed.

Peter Winick Great. So you saw this opportunity and sort of take that all the way through the music side to the Desire company, because there’s a non-obvious throughline there that you bring to life in a nice way from our previous.

Eric Shienkop Sure. I mean, the overall theme is I’ve always focused my companies on creating platforms for underserved artists, really of all types. And that could be an entrepreneur, that could be a musician, that could be a painter. But giving a platform for them to monetize their craft outside of the traditional ways. So, you know, with my first company, we had the largest community of musicians. We became the largest provider of music to McDonalds, Disney, Viacom. Coca-Cola ended up selling part of that coming into Coca-Cola, which was wonderful. And in this company, what we’re doing is we have the largest community of multidisciplinary experts. And so we have everybody from veterinarians and doctors to Web fleets to astronauts. So these are the people that are typically behind the camera with a deep experience in a particular area. And we partner with them with brands to talk about a product from a particular use case. And that’s resonating with consumers in a way that’s never been done through influencer or through your traditional means of marketing.

Peter Winick Got it. Got it. So unpacked the desire company, then a little bit. And watch what the underlying ideas are behind it.

Eric Shienkop Yeah. So I mean, again, anytime you look at an industry and it’s just old and not working because it hasn’t caught up, there’s an opportunity there for thought leadership. And that’s really what we’ve tackled here, which is reviews are extremely important to the shopping experience, but they haven’t been updated since the beginning of reviews, except you’re seeing every product with 15,005 star reviews back to the real. That’s not sustainable and it’s not helpful.

Peter Winick So is isn’t the review problem similar to sort of the Lake Wobegon, where if everybody’s above average, something’s wrong? Right. So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out like, nobody problem. Like something doesn’t smell right here, which defeats the whole purpose of community based reviews, right? You’re supposed to be able to.

Eric Shienkop Set a 100% year for you’re looking for guidance on is this the right product for me, for my needs? How do I use it? What do you like about it? Who’s a recommended for? And that doesn’t exist in the review industry anymore?

Peter Winick Well, and most importantly, you’re also looking for that to not to come from people like me, whatever that means. I don’t care what the company says. Of course they’re going to jump start. Their stuff is greater than sliced bread. But I want to hear, you know, from either a stranger or someone I know that says, yeah, this did what it said it would, or here’s what I liked, didn’t like, etc..

Eric Shienkop Absolutely. And that’s exactly the other part of the industry that we’re tackling, which is influencer. So that was the whole point of influencers. I want to hear from a third party about this particular product, but now influencer hasn’t changed since, you know, development originally 15, 20 years ago now, and everybody’s an influencer these days. So that’s a system that’s broken. It’s not moving, it’s not evolving, and it’s not helping consumers. So there’s an opportunity.

Peter Winick Let me just stay there a minute. So the opportunity that you saw is I mean, influencer today is really no different than a spokesperson. So it used to be a spokesperson. You know, whatever, pick a company. They paid someone with notoriety to say good things about their product. Right back in the day, it was, you know, OJ Simpson running through airports for Hertz. Right. Like. Right. But now in the in the social media world, the beauty of influencers is it’s niche down, right? So I might look to whatever Kim Kardashian for beauty tips or this one for that or and then they’ve got their followers so people can advertisers can look and say if I want to go after this type of demographic psychographic, that’s an influencer for me. But your sweet spot is going okay, Just because you got a lot of people in your popular doesn’t mean you have a credibility like, well, should we take Kim Kardashian? And I’m not beating up on Kim, but yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Kim Kardashian’s advice on nutrition, she doesn’t have any degrees in nutrition. You know, she eats three times a day like I do. So your model is really, really cool. Talk about what you’ve done, which I think.

Eric Shienkop Yeah. So that’s I mean, that’s exactly right. We only focus on people who are accredited professionals in their very specific niche. So you’re absolutely right. When you talk about what influencers today, influencer is a billboard and it will serve their purpose, and influence still works, but it works at the very top of the funnel. It works as an awareness driver. It does not work as the converting mechanism that it used to because everybody is aware of it now, everybody’s used to it. So when you think about it, like what we’ve done is we’ve really become the first movers, thought leaders and trusted expert product content for commerce. And the way that we’ve done it is instead of using a Kim Kardashian to talk about makeup, we use Kim Kardashian’s makeup artist who has 20 years of experience being a professional makeup artist. And then you can get more specific and you could go into wedding makeup artist or runway makeup of television. And the whole idea now, too, is it doesn’t matter how many followers somebody has because the algorithms are going to make you pay if you want anybody to see it. So Meadows very aware of what influencer marketing is, and they know that if there’s a brand being promoted, they are going to suppress that content unless you pay to boost it. So our whole thing is you could buy, right? But you cannot buy expertise.

Peter Winick And I think that’s the key because I think if you think of this from a. You know, on a pyramid or next level, you’re saying, okay, yeah, maybe you listen to Kim because or whatever, her eyes look pretty or something like this. But then what? Are you really going to take her advice on? Whatever. So when you think about the experts that one should be listening to, whether they have the reach or not. So what you’re really doing is filtering out the expertise to say whether you know it or not. This is Peter. This is who you should really listen to. If you’re someone that is thinking about, you know, putting together a home gym. Right. Because that is absolutely right.

Eric Shienkop That’s absolutely right. I mean, for the home gym thing, we have NFL players will be up there, trainers. We have Olympic athletes, we have American Ninja Warriors. And they could talk about putting together their home gym in a totally different way than a celebrity. You know, then a Kim Kardashian is able to these are the people who do it for the Kim Kardashian’s of the world. So you do naturally lean in when you hear somebody who’s clearly educated on a particular topic that you have interest in. And that’s what our content at the Desire Company does. It takes over where influencer leaves off. So influencers that billboard, Hey, this product exists, I’m going to drive some awareness, but then what? To your point, I want to lean in now and understand more about this particular product and how to use it. What are the results that I can expect?

Peter Winick And if you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five star review at ratethispodcast.com/ltl and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcast.

Peter Winick Let me pivot a little bit. So now let’s take this to sort of bridge my world in your world, right? The world of thought leadership. I don’t do B2C, right? Nobody’s coming to me asking for makeup advice or nutrition advice or gym advice, thank God. They might ask me for a restaurant recommendation. Yeah, right. But that’s because I like to eat. But think about the B2B side of this, right? And I think that you and I had an interesting conversation around that. Right. So an organization is thinking, hey, it would be good if we learned how to innovate better, how to collaborate better, how to negotiate better, etc.. How does that play out in your world or how will that be?

Eric Shienkop Yeah. So we are a B to B platform. We are B to B to C So we provide the content for the consumer, but we do it through retailers and through brands. But just back up and going back into your world and where the thought leadership plays a role and how this evolves to help our business is in, you know, going back real fast to my last business, I was trying to get into Microsoft four years. I was trying to do music for Microsoft for many years. Cold calling, knocking on the door. And nobody picked up. Nobody invited me. And I ended up having a book published by Macmillan. Yes. On a marketing thought leadership topic that I trademarked called Social Empowerment Connected Consumer Beyond the Product and created an emotional relationship so that they actually talk about your product out in their life in the real world. Yep. So the book came out, became a number one bestseller. Microsoft calls me and flew me out, put me up and paid me to come in and speak to all their marketers.

Peter Winick Right. So they’re a minute because that’s that is critical, right? So the day before you wrote the book, you were no less smart or smarter than the day after. But what the book and it doesn’t have to be a book, but using book is sort of yeah, in your state, but it could be the idea of leadership, whatever. Now they’re calling you and saying, Can you come on in? And by the way, here’s a big fat check. I’ll put you up in a nice hotel and all that and talk as you would I. You can yourself or you’re probably security is probably throwing out the front door before that. So I love that that the thought leadership that you developed, that you became known for is the door opener. And by the way, who cares how many books you sold that one book that got to the one Microsoft executive was a game changer for you?

Eric Shienkop Absolutely. And they do buy all your books to hand out to all their marketers. So that’s a good thing. And, you know, I ended up doing a European book tour for like six months and all these places that I could not get the time of day all of a sudden were, you know, rolling out the red carpet to have me come in. So that thought leadership angle, it is what people need. The problem that I think exists out there is why should I trust this one versus this one? And that book was my stamp of credibility. Then when Coca-Cola, you know, bought my part of my company, that was you know, that process just made everybody feel comfortable, like, okay, this company, I’m going to invite them in. They’re going to help us out. And the same thing now exists. Whereas the challenge in with the desire company that people are used to, the influencer model, they know that words are broke, but there’s nothing out there we’re coming with. You got to emotionally connect with your consumers. Reviews aren’t cutting it and influencer isn’t cutting it anymore. We’re going to give you this thoughtful information, but we’re still at that early point where I.

Peter Winick Think it’s really early because I still think we’re living in a world where, you know, you have a conversation with somebody and they’ll say, yeah, well, and I think this. And I said, Well, why do you think that? And I don’t think political. Why read it? But where did you read it online? Okay. Well, that could have been somebody’s dopey brother-in-law with an opinion on whatever. And not all opinions are created equal. Like it doesn’t matter what I think about 99% of the things in the world to most people, where there’s a little bit of what matters is in my domain expertise. That’s where you should listen to me. Anything else it needs it almost needs to be asterix just an opinion. Right.

Eric Shienkop And I think backtracked that. Yeah. As hard.

Peter Winick Yeah. And sometimes someone could have confidence, charisma, energy, a brand, whatever it is. And people are generally lazy, so. Well I heard some, you know, talking ed or whatever or I saw this or I saw that. But I love that you’re pretty much raising the bar. And I do believe you’re really, really early in the game. And my hope is that people say, well, who is this? Why should I listen to so and so and so and so? And in your case, they can say it’s not because I’ve got more Twitter followers than you, but this is my education, my experience, domain expertise. My, my, you know, this is where I am and what I do. I love that. Yeah.

Eric Shienkop I mean, at the end of the day, we’re experts and experts. That’s what we do. And we provide a totally different way of going about marketing. As an example, one of our clients there came out with new eye drops and new vitamins for your eyes to help with the dry eye as well that of going to an optometrist. We got them NASCAR drivers and professional gamers. So these are careers where you are taught not to blink. So for them to talk about their dry eye and the and the use of this particular product, it connects with a consumer way beyond even what a doctor, an optometrist, would be talking about because you actually relate to it if you’re hitting the right demographic with that content.

Peter Winick So telling a gamer here’s something that can give you a competitive edge in gaming is far better than any eye doctor would be. Like, What’s Minecraft like? They don’t even like that. Those don’t collide, right?

Eric Shienkop And yeah, and the kids would ignore it if it came from a dog.

Peter Winick It comes from there, right?

Eric Shienkop If it comes from professional gamer, all of a sudden they’re going to look and they’re going to be interested and they’re going to. Purchase and it happens. And they’re going to enjoy that product because it’s got a use case specifically right for them.

Peter Winick Got it. So if someone’s out there in a situation where you are, let’s say a year or 2 or 3 before the book, they’ve got it. They’ve got passion. They know there’s a market for it, but they’re, you know, their knuckles are bleeding from knocking on doors. Right. Is just not happening. What would you advise them? Or in this case, maybe you. At years ago?

Eric Shienkop Yeah. I mean, I actually sat and I thought about at the point before the book, how do I do this? What are the steps that I need to take? And I started on panels. Just get me on a panel so that I could start voicing my opinion.

Peter Winick And realize the idea.

Eric Shienkop Just talk it up. Yeah, let me talk through it. Then those panels moved into keynotes. I started putting out white papers pretty regularly, putting out white papers. I became a frequent guest on podcasts and radio. And then I was able to take everything from, you know, a good two years of putting this together to write the book. And it was really.

Peter Winick You sort of forensically wrote the book, right? So when you talk about a white paper, I just want to be clear. Some people think of a white paper as sort of a faux marketing thing, but when you’re talking about a white paper, I’m assuming it’s based in research, based in fact based. It’s not a little. And. Eric Yeah. Okay. And I think the market’s getting smarter, right? So then you’ve got all this stuff out there, you’re trying it, you’re casting. I mean, the beautiful thing about being on panels is the bar is pretty low, right? You don’t have to ask to be paid. You could test that ideas and go, okay, That was a question I want to ask again. Right? You’re testing the ideas in real time. You know, polishing them, polishing and polishing them, then move it to a white paper. Then when you wrote the book, it was pretty, I would say, and tell me if I’m reading the tea was wrong. It was really a forensic activity, right? Let me go backward and stitch together all the stuff I know 100%.

Eric Shienkop And it was interviewing clients that we had worked with, the after effect of working with us. And so, yes, it was absolutely that. And I’m in the same process now with the Desire company. So we put out white papers and to your point, the white paper that we have out right now and that we’re updating is all about the new FTC laws that go into effect next month. So they’ve been talking about this for years. We put out a white paper a year ago on it, and now everything that’s been a recommendation from the FTC around reviews and influencer is becoming law, $50,000 fines per violation. So we’re updating our white paper. But again, like that is just fact. Yeah. And you know, I’m speaking with you on panels. I’m able I’m starting to give keynotes and there will be another book in the future. I love it. I have worked it all out yet, but that’s part of the process is exactly what you said. We’re out here. We’re talking about it. We’re testing. We’re seeing what’s resonating. And to your point, sometimes, you know, being too early is the same thing as being wrong.

Peter Winick So, yeah, sometimes being too early. What you know, it’s great that you’re right, but what you don’t want to see is what you gave up on it. And five years later, somebody else and comes and you know, which is that it’s at the table, right?

Eric Shienkop So that’s the toughest thing in the world. I mean, my dad’s best friend always tells me about it. My he reminds me at my childhood science fair, I made an electric skateboard. I was just on. It’s too early. So. And it died. I didn’t have any money or anything to keep it going so. Or to develop it. And by yes, I mean that you cannot be too early for the market, otherwise it’s never going to stick. And then somebody comes and takes your idea.

Peter Winick Love it. Well, this has been great. I really, really appreciate your time, Eric, and I love what you’re doing. Thank you.

Eric Shienkop Thank you, Peter. I appreciate it.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.