What Beyoncé Can Teach Modern Marketers
20 Grammys, the most nominated female in Grammy history, a net worth of $265M, and the only artist to debut their first six albums at #1, according to Billboard. Beyoncé is clearly successful by any measure.
The superstar talent could teach a business school course on how she nurtures her multimillion-dollar brand, especially the way that she has harnessed surprise in her most recent albums.
Long before Mrs. Kardashian-West tried to #breaktheinternet, Beyoncé was lighting up Twitter when she unexpectedly dropped her self titled album back in 2013. In May 2016, she followed up with “Lemonade”, an surprise album that broke streaming records and may have saved the streaming service Tidal from subscriber life support.
We work in a world where brands embellish the launch of products with Alternate Reality Games, timely “leaks”, behind the scenes updates and influencer seeding. These tactics can be great, but the ‘Beyoncé Drop’ has been nothing short of refreshing.
To eschew priming the celebrity news cycle and avoiding the timeworn launch framework of TEASE/LAUNCH/SUSTAIN, exudes a confidence many performers and marketers wouldn’t have dared to do before she led the way.
However, Beyonce’s success isn’t built upon her surprise announcements alone. She paired the power of a surprise launch with content that was every bit as unexpected. From the concept of a visual album, to the country-infused “Daddy Lessons”, to the very ‘honest’ approach of subtly blowing the curtains off her guarded marriage to Jay-Z.
As Lindsay Zoladz recently noted in The Ringer,
“what we risk, in fetishizing the surprise album, is mistaking promotional innovation for artistic innovation, making the particulars of the album rollout seem more important than the songs”.
Its in these two lessons of considering the power of the surprise launch and ensuring that our content is always unexpected, that I take most inspiration. Our job as marketers is not to embellish our clients’ brands, but to share something truthful in a timely, novel and arresting way. We can utilize surprise both in terms of the way we rollout campaigns and in the ways we frame our messages.
