What Lady Gaga Taught Us About Branding
After watching the Super Bowl this past Sunday, disappointed by the Falcons’ loss, the Juicers couldn’t help but think about Lady Gaga’s halftime show. Lady Gaga is a very versatile performer who is constantly changing her brand. With every album, Gaga’s whole entire image seems to shift to something completely new. Such behavior is common with entrepreneurs who simply tire of their old brand and desire a change on a whim.
In Gaga’s post-halftime show commercial, she claims “I love to change. It makes me feel alive.” Be warned, there’s a danger in constantly changing your brand just because you feel like it. With every change, a significant portion of Gaga’s fans are lost due to them missing her old ways. So as they heard her perform all her old songs this Sunday, the show’s critiques were tinged with pure nostalgia.
Branding is a very delicate process if you aren’t a pop-star. It takes weeks of fine-tuning to ensure that the changes you make are the ones that your business needs. While Gaga herself is an artist with her own vision, feel free to contact design professionals like the Juicers to help you develop your branding decisions. In fact, here are some branding lessons from Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl Performance:
Find your niche. OWN it.
Stop trying to be the “next” Apple. Be the next you. Lady Gaga’s fame rose because she channeled a quirky and weird club-kid vibe that stood out from other pop stars. She became the sole owner of a visual look. Her style and brand became synonymous with the word “artsy”. When developing your own brand, find a characteristic unique to you that your competitors don’t possess. All it takes is claiming one specific word and making it yours.
Know your fan base
Once you know who you are, find out who you’re marketing towards. As an artist herself, Gaga catered towards the freaks, underdogs, and party monsters. That might not be your specific crowd, but try to create emotions and experiences for your consumer that lets them know that you’re there for specifically them. For example, Lady Gaga has been known to perform secret shows around the country for her fans in small, intimate bars. Such individualized attention helps create a core user group who become even more loyal to your brand.
Ignore the haters and do you
Not everyone will like the changes you make to your brand. Lady Gaga’s tendency to not be heavily-influenced by critique is what made her so popular in the first place. As long as the changes you make are smart and necessary, try to give some new branding a chance to thrive! Abandoning your old ways can feel risky at first, but it often pays off in the end.