3 Marketing Fails Solange Used On SZA’s Video ‘The Weekend’

Most people I know love Beyonce. Because we love her, we also had a soft spot in our heart for our favs little sister. We notice her look, how she pushes the fashion limits and support the rhetoric of the type of black woman she exudes. Her Instagram pictures are ALWAYS popping and very aesthetically pleasing. So when I heard she was directing the SZA video, I was excited but really did not know what it would look like. Black Twitter rejoiced but now that I have looked at it we definitely put the cart before the horse.

Solange is overrated and I am going to give you the reasons why from a marketing perspective.

1. She did not do her due diligence to consider the artists following:

She did not take into consideration the following of the artist she was working with. When working with any brand you do your due diligence to figure out who their target market is. You can even go as far as doing a survey to take to a segment of the target audience. If she was to do that, she would have known that her ideas would have needed some revisions at the storyboard level.

2. She did not use a plot.

This is a breakout artist with a HUGE hit. This song makes you get in your feelings and thoughts. We can ENVISION a storyline without the video. From twitter memes to Instagram memes to phone calls with girlfriends we ALL had a plot going on. Solange decided not to do that and in my opinion was complete negligence. Based on the song alone SZA already has 5.3 million views on her youtube channel. But the comments are horrible. People are upset and the anger is directed at Solange the director. When you think of videos, you want to create one that will bring people back over and over. You want the views to continue to rise and you want the artist to continue to constantly get money from her views.

3. She did not reinvent the wheel she actually copied it and used poor picture quality.

She literally copied her homework and changed it up a little. There is soooo much I want to say about this but I will keep it simple. You cannot use your brand and photocopy it and change it up a little and hope it will work. This video looked like the cheap version of Cranes in the sky. There are so many similarities to it that it is not funny. To top it off she used a filter so now it looks like the poor version of cranes in the sky.

All in all, as a someone being HIRED to help a brand, Solange did not do her job. With this breakout hit, she had potential to help SZA be one of the most viewed music videos on youtube of all time! But she failed tremendously.

In a world where Solange is constantly looked at bringing A+ work, I say she really is a strong B+.

Here is the video, if you have not seen it yet. Be sure to check out the comments!