Shantay You Slay: Lessons on Marketing from RuPaul’s Drag Race
It’s a good decade to be a drag queen in America. Last weekend, four of America’s top drag queens went head to head in the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 10 — a record-breaking season finale watched by over 527,000 viewers, not to mention live-streamed by hundreds of thousands more around the world.
For those who aren’t familiar with it — RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality competition show where a bevy of drag performers face off on challenges involving sewing, acting,and lip-syncing, among others. It’s hard to imagine a more niche show garnering such mainstream appeal. Yet in the past 10 years, Rupaul’s Drag Race has become a worldwide phenomenon, with an Emmy win under its belt, and spin-offs in other countries.
It’s a lot to take in, for sure — but beyond the glitter and gowns, there are key lessons that the marketing and advertising industry can take from this fierce upstart show.
Lesson 1: From Niche to Norm
In an early season of Sex and the City, the sexually-assertive Samantha tells her lover about a sure three-step process to break into the crowded world of entertainment: win over the gays, then the girls, then the industry. Drag Race seems to have followed the same key route. After years of niche fandom in the LGBT community, the show has recently gained an enormous and fierce fanbase of young straight women — most of whom initially heard about it from LGBT friends.
Now Drag Race seems to have taken a solid, bedazzled step into the third stage. The industry’s taken notice, with publications like Cosmopolitan and Vogue regularly featuring past contestants in articles, recaps and videos. Even straight men have begun to get into it — the show is a recommended must-watch for celebrities like Andrew Garfield, Andy Cohen, and so on.
Without knowing it, Samantha and Rupaul have both acted on a much older, less sexy marketing principle: Crossing the Chasm. Proposed by Geoffrey Moore, this theory states that the hardest part of any product launch is the key gap between early adopters (who are actively interested in new products and innovations) to the early majority (the mainstream market).
How to cross that chasm? Find a suitable niche target in the early majority, then use that niche to spread the word. This is the same tactic Apple used for its early computers — it first directly targeted graphic designers, who then spread the word to marketers and other people within the industry. In this case, young girls seem to have acted as the gap-bridger for Drag Race — a vector to launch the show out of the nightclubs and into popular culture.
Interestingly, it’s critical not to stay in the niche forever — Drag Race has subversiveness in its DNA, but to be a major player in an industry it’s important to grow your consumer base beyond an initial niche. Maintaining your originality while growing penetration is a key challenge for many growing brands — see Hendrick’s Gin, for instance — and it’s one that Drag Race continues to face.
Lesson 2: Your position is chosen for you
As any longtime viewer of the show would tell you, Drag Race relies on its many catchphrases — “don’t fuck it up”, “sashay away” and more. These witty one-liners have become an increasingly large part of gay vernacular — but they’re a bit more than that. In an unconventional way, they act as brand assets: as integral to the show’s identity as say, the lime is to Corona, or the hourglass bottle is to Coke.
This conscious, careful cultivation of personal branding even extends to the performers themselves. Every season, queens are encouraged to develop a unique identity — critical in an industry with many big personalities and a very selective spotlight. It’s no wonder Rupaul often states that “America’s Next Drag Superstar… needs to be a bit of a marketing genius”. This has led to queens taking an active effort in “owning” their own catchphrases, merchandise and more.
In more recent seasons, the focus on personal branding has taken a new level — for example, All-Stars 2 winner Alaska took advantage of an unprecedented level of fan hate and turned it into a powerful personal asset. Taking inspiration from the thousands of angry snake-emojis tweeted at her (it’s a long story), she actively dubbed herself the Queen of Snakes, incorporating snakes into her merchandise, songs, outfits and more.
This highlights another truth — sometimes the assets and associations that define your brand are not the ones you choose — but rather ones that consumers choose for you. As All Stars 3 winner Trixie Mattel has noted, queens who come into the show with pre-selected catchphrases and trademarks often fail to land. Far more effective, it seems, are queens who take fan comments and real moments and leverage them into assets and catchphrases.
In the same way, many brands’ actual positioning and associations are chosen for them by consumers. In the vacuum of a workshop or a branding session, it’s fairly easy to agonize about what particular brand assets are meant to communicate. But in the harsh light of a store shelf, filtered through past experience and framed by competitor brands, your assets can be perceived in ways that are widely different from what you imagined. An important tactic here is to take a page out of Alaska’s book and adapt to how consumers see you. A key example of a brand that’s done the same is Alexa — taking advantage of consumers’ parodies to develop its own celebrity-filled Super Bowl commercial — and McDonalds — taking actual consumer complaints and bringing them to life in a recent campaign.
Lesson 3: Content for content’s sake
As spectacular as the show is, the Drag Race experience doesn’t end with the show — the episode itself is just the first step in a journey that spans platforms and channels. After watching the show, most viewers go online to watch the behind-the-scenes spinoff show Untucked — where a vast majority of the juiciest, most drama-filled fights occur. Once they’re on Youtube, viewers are just one click away from Drag Race’s true weapon: a plethora of drag vlogs and web series hosted on its channel WowPresents. Ranging from comedy vlogs to makeup tutorials, these series feature the most exciting queens from past seasons, while also allowing slightly lower-tier queens a second chance to shine.
It’s here where fans become truly engaged — following each web-series to individual queens’ videos and social media sites. It’s also where purchase comes into play — with each Youtube video, viewers are encouraged to buy merchandise, buy into premium webcontent (WowPresents plus) and reserve tickets to concerts and to the show’s expensive mega-event, DragCon.
As a work of content marketing, it’s a masterpiece: a blend of branded and organic content that puts most consumer brands to shame. And it’s all mixed into a living, online community of fans — something many brands could only dream of. But more importantly, that journey is never content for content’s sake. There’s a clear call-to-action at every step — all leading to purchase — and a full economy of drag is emerging as a result.
For most other brands, the “content strategy” is much less thought out — at best, a series of tweets or dull “content” videos blanketed across channels with no link to sales, or even to the brand. It’s important to take a note from Drag Race here: that your content needs to look and sound different across different channels, and that your content — as amazing as it can be — needs to translate into actual brand sales to make its mark.
In summary:
Watching the season 10 finale feels like witnessing an especially unique milestone — a symbol of RuPaul’s Drag Race sashaying into its role as a marketing powerhouse. Again, it’s not a show that you’d expect to have such strategic weight — and that’s why I feel it’s so important for marketers and advertisers to look for learning beyond the typical industry books and magazines. Unconventional pieces of culture like Drag Race have had to fight tooth-and-nail for viewers’ attention and money — and in doing so, they’ve developed fierce marketing strategies that we can all learn from.
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