Lessons from brand Gaga
In this guest post, Jaid Hulsbosch finds lessons for marketers in controversial performer Lady Gaga.
One of the leading brand innovators in global business today is a young woman called Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – also known as Lady Gaga.
She is an artist and a brand and her team are clever marketers. They are showing businesses how to build a successful global brand in record time in today’s fragmented media environment.
Thanks to Germanotta’s success, the words “brand” and “branding” are now well understood by more and more people. As someone who works in the industry, it makes it much easier when you explain what you do to create value for clients.
For those of us in brand and marketing, there are several key lessons to be learned from her success.
In less than four years, Lady Gaga has accrued a more than one billion views on YouTube averaging 85 million views per month. Her earnings for 2011 are estimated to be $100m or more.
Gaga has reconfirmed that true brand creation is about identifying a unique, ownable positioning and developing a personality that tells everyone what you stand for. She has also reminded us of the importance of creating a compelling story and a narrative that underpins everything you say and do.
She reminds us of the importance of engaging with your customers on an emotional level. Lady Gaga stands for creativity and advocacy for everyone and anyone who has felt different – her “little monsters.”
She is doing what all great global consumer and business brands have done – employed good storytelling to connect and engage directly with their customers.
Throughout history, great companies have used storytelling techniques to engage consumers. Starting with Ford, Cadbury’s, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s to today’s technology brands, Apple, Google, Facebook, EBay, to fashion brands like Louis Vuitton and Hermes. All have great brand narratives with depth and meaning for their customer base.
They all stand for something important in the minds of their customers and often act like consumer advocates through the language they use and the promises they make.
Great brand narratives also pitch one hero against another. The famous 2006 “I’m a Mac” ad campaign perfectly captures the Apple versus PC truth – you are either one or the other and by identifying yourself as a Mac or PC person, you are telling the world a lot about your values.
Some brand narratives simply celebrate the human spirit. For example, Virgin’s post punk, entrepreneurial spirit has enabled it to move from the record industry (a good move, considering what’s happening to the music business now) to travel, to mobile phones, fitness centres and more.
You may not be a Virgin customer, but we are all interested to know what the next installment of the story will be. And part of us wishes we were more entrepreneurial.
The best brand narratives are broad, allowing fans (or consumers) to interpret stories in their own way, using their imagination.
The other lesson from Gaga is that brands must constantly change. Great brands continually evolve, surprise and delight. And they use design to express different sides of their personality, giving fans (or consumers) visual cues or shortcuts that are far more powerful than words (just read mythologist Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces).
Technology has long been the driver of growth in music and just about every other industry. Gaga has reminded us that successful brands must always connect and communicate with customers whenever and wherever they are.
Her message resonates with her fans and she has perfected the art of connecting with her fan base on multiple social media platforms. She projects leadership and excites loyalty in others.
While it is easy to dismiss pop culture, the truth is that all businesses – whether is the local cafe or a new global technology company – need a brand story, a brand vision and a succinct brand promise. This is what consumers connect with and ultimately buy into.
The clearer a brand is defined, the easier it is for businesses to create effective marketing communications. The more clearly companies are aligned with their brand promise, the more people understand and appreciate what they are trying to achieve and why they should stick around. This extends to employees, with brand reputation being a magnet for talent.
Business will always need creative agencies to help them articulate their stories, because great storytelling is a creative pursuit; it is often about subtlety and nuance.
But in a fragmented, fast-moving world over-loaded by information you have to be careful not to just articulate your story through wordy ads, but instead consider how the story is expressed through all consumer touch-points, from the form and shape of the packaging to the sound of the staff to the scent used in the store to the texture of the seating.
Gaga proves brand stories succeed when they are consistently expressed in everything you do.
Jaid Hulsbosch is director of branding agency Hulsbosch
i just thought she had catchy songs and very kooky outfits
I don’t know that it’s much more cerebral than that, to be honest..!
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agree Sven – I’ve been doing this for years (“branding” artists, not a term we’d use) and the best mechanical execution of digital strategy (or any other element, for that matter) means bugger-all if people don’t like the artist and/or the song. there are countless mediocre artists with incredibly sophisticated digital/social strategies and conversely there are a large number of online phenomenons who stumble across platforms by accident, largely due to the fact that their audience dictates it. lady gaga has engaged her audience online incredibly effectively (note she communicates in first person where someone like beyonce does not) and if she’s not re-writing the rule book she’s certainly adding a few chapters. not entirely sure what the abovementioned article adds to the discussion though…
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@ sven – how does one become a celebrity? Personal branding is as, if not more important than their acting skills, singing ability etc. Their kooky outfits are part of that brand and the experience of it.
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OMG….I think we’ve entered the realm of ‘Dr Stangelove’ with all the comment about “Vile Grubbilands” attracting so much attention. I must be missing something here but who is this fat, ugly dude? From where I sit, he’s a lard-arsed simpleton who has lucked – temporarily – into a profile role and will disappear quickly from our collectible psyche….most probably via his own astounding lack of talent. “Mr Opinion Masquerading as Fact”….Geez, if ever a guy took an hour & a half to watch “60 Minutes” it’s “our “Vile”…..!!
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No insights here, just a business pitch. She is a hugley succesful pop artist – the fact she is a clever marketer of her content across platforms used by her fans flows naturally from that. ACME widgets cannot learn lessons from Gaga.
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Over 600 words and not one reference to Gaga’s music – says it all really.
Gaga also proves
1. Adam Ferres thoughts on GenY being the biggest suckers for style over substance marketing
2. you really can polish a turd
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So how is it that brand consultants have no real understanding of the science of branding – just the witch doctory of branding. This essay is a mess of confusion around product and brand.
A brand is a device that helps a consumer make a shortcut to a buying decision. We don’t know much about anything we buy and since a lot of purchases are sporadic, i.e TV, cars, camera’s we use the brands we remember as a shortcut to making a complete category evaluation.
The only job of a marketer is to make the brand memorable in a specific product category and then make it easy to buy. The thing that makes a brand memorable is often years of consistency – Coca-Cola, MacDonalds, Toyota, Mercedes have the same “brand narrative” they had 20 years ago. The products have changed the brands have not. Coke still stands for refreshment, Maccas for quality, cleanliness and value (I think) and Toyota for quality, durability and reliability.
To suggest that Gaga and someone choosing cheese slices of a supermarket shelf or a cola in a milkbar are all about a brand narrative is to my mind just a little far fetched.
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Who is this Gaga you people speak of?
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Pisses me off to see a brand expert try to hijack the Gaga success story as a branding success story. And using her “to explain what you do when you create value for clients” is really pushing it. Gaga is a phenomenon because she is talented – an exceptional product. Amongst other things, she is an extremely creative visual artist (to be carried on stage in an egg is brilliant.) And she’s an entertainer, for god’s sake, so emotionally connecting with people is her thing. The only lesson for your clients from Lady Gaga is..it all comes down to your product. Get creative and make your product the best on the planet and the rest will take care of itself, with or without branding gurus.
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@Trevor… very true. Your comments on consistency are spot on. I think this story tends to over simplify the creation of brands and time and consistency are absolutely key. As for Lady GaGa, Rushdie is right, she is a fantastic product that answered a specific niche for a disenfranchised audience and her ‘percieved brand’ is a result of that.
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Well said Rushdie!
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@Tim – your contributors should commit to take part in the resulting conversation in comments as a condition of entry.
Too many seem happy to pitch their self serving POV and then disappear into the ether when questions and clarifications are raised.
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@ Daniel – good point. Hand that man a shovel.
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This article doesn’t feel very well informed.
brands don’t need to be consistently expressed they need to be consistently comprehended (the expression may and arguably should, often change)
What’s gaga’s brand? If it’s so clear please define it? Anything goes? Then what’s not gaga?
Gaga succeeds at a product level irrespective of branding (and if you think that’s the same thing then why bother putting a new skin of paint on virgin airlines.)
I sometimes wonder why it is that design agencies are not the lead agency for clients. They should be as they could control most of the brand. This article potentially shows why they are not (because they don’t get brand – just design).
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Im sure drought stricken farmers even know the differences between branding and product. What a cow of an article.
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