Brandwashed (29 page)

On the male side, there are colognes attached to the famous names Justin Timberlake, David Beckham, Usher, Tim McGraw, Andre Agassi, and even
Donald Trump. “We are confident that men of all ages want to experience some part of Mr. Trump’s passion and taste for luxury,” said Aramis president
Fabrice Weber.
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Actually, it appears they don’t. In one of the few cases where putting a celebrity name on a product
didn’t
work, a few years after it hit the shelves, according to one gimlet-eyed blogger, Donald Trump for Men could be found on clearance at T. J. Maxx for $8, down from $48.
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The latest scent? Eau de Bruce Willis, which the manufacturer describes as the “manliest scent in the world,” an aroma that allegedly captures the actor’s “strength, self-assurance and single-mindedness.”
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Of course, celebrity branding is nothing new in the multibillion-dollar fragrance industry. Decades ago, perfume companies and advertisers realized that a famous name could goad consumers into forming an intimate connection with a brand. And at the same time,
celebrities realized they could potentially earn many millions of dollars licensing their names and images to a fragrance. Quick—can you name the most successful celebrity perfume of all time? Answer: it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, with more than $1 billion in sales to date (typically, with this sort of arrangement, a celebrity takes anywhere from between 5 percent and 10 percent of a fragrance’s total sales).
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Celebrities have long been aware of their value not just to fragrance and beauty companies but also to fashion designers.
Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer (now a celebrity in his own right), got his start by setting up a Los Angeles studio and recruiting celebrities to wear his outfits,
thus helping to create today’s obsession with the outfits
celebrities wear to the Oscars, Golden Globes, and countless other awards shows.

In recent years, however, celebs have taken this even one step further, as fading stars have realized that owning and launching their own product line can not only be lucrative but can help breathe new life into their careers. For
Jennifer Lopez, who’s licensed her name to a handful of scents, this tactic has paid off staggeringly well. In 2006, according to
Forbes
’s list of the twenty richest women in entertainment, sales of her fragrances not only accounted for $77 million of her net worth of $100 million,
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but they gave JLo the added visibility and publicity boost that undoubtedly helped her end a dry period and snag a series of producer gigs as well as roles in the films
Monster-in-Law
and, more recently,
The Back-up Plan
.

A fragrance executive who had been involved in the launch of a global celebrity’s line of perfume once told me an interesting story. The famous singer/actor in question had never worn cologne in his life (
sssshh!
) and hadn’t a clue what he was doing, so fragrance company representatives visited the star at his home in search of inspiration. They went from room to room, jotting down notes about his sense of style and design (which weren’t much to speak of, according to my friend) in an attempt to figure out both the values he projected and what he symbolized to his worldwide fan base. From there, the fragrance reps went back and created an assortment of scents. The star selected one, and the rest was all profit. The bottle and “the juice” cost next to nothing to produce, but thanks to the celebrity brand name, people were happy to shell out $60, $80, $100, or more for a few mere ounces of it.

Of course, celebrity brands are inordinately successful in other product categories, too. If you were to ask a group of fifteen-year-old kids today who
Paul Newman is, most of them would answer, “a salad dressing” or “lemonade.” That’s because in 1982, after Paul Newman retired from his long film career, he rolled out a small Connecticut-based packaged foods business with his friend, the writer A. E. Hotchner. Having started the company on a whim, Newman had anticipated sales of roughly $1,200 annually; instead, over the past twenty-six years,
Newman’s Own has made close to $300 million (which it has distributed to various charities).

Then there are those countless celebrities who don’t just create and
sell a brand but
are
the brand.
David Bowie was the first big pop icon to use classic marketing tactics to brand (and rebrand) himself. Just as successful brands like Pepsi, Old Spice, and Nike are constantly revamping their packages, redesigning their logos, and reinventing their public images, in 1973, at the height of his fame, Bowie shed his multiple identities as a glam rocker, a disaffected friend of Warhol, and Ziggy Stardust. Good-bye Ziggy, hello, well, you name it. On the cover of
Diamond Dogs
, Bowie appeared as half male, half canine. For his next album, he’d transformed himself again into an elegant, if unsettling, Aryan persona known as the “Thin White Duke.” During his late-1980s world tour, when Bowie announced to his fans it would be the last time he would be playing “old material,” “it was a huge public relations success, prompting sales of his newly re-mastered albums to skyrocket.”
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And as any lucrative brand would be clever to do, several years later, in 1997, Bowie issued “Bowie Bonds,” asset-backed securities of both current and future revenues. The deal (and the attendant PR) netted the singer a cool $55 million up front.
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Madonna, of course, is another master at the art of personal rebranding. Most people are aware that she’s gone through quite a few “looks” over the years, but what most people don’t know is how strategically and shrewdly she works to project a new “brand image” of herself with each of her new
musical releases. Whether it’s the good girl gone to seed, a virgin dressed all in white, a spirit attired in Kabbalah beads, a pale, Michigan-born version of Marilyn Monroe, a cone-breasted robot, or a yoga-obsessed UK expatriate, the way she transforms how others see her is nothing short of marketing genius. As Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, was once quoted as saying, “She is always evolving: she never stands still. Every two years she comes up with a new look, a new way of presenting herself, a new attitude, a new act, and a new design. And every time it is successful.”
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Now I’m going to let you in on how she does it. For each new CD, Madonna creates a collage of magazine photos, illustrations, and news stories about the latest and most cutting-edge trends in today’s—and tomorrow’s—culture. Rumor has it that she and her creative and production team then proceed to create a persona, to which they tailor everything from the CD case to the clothes she wears to the rhythm of the actual music. This is one way Madonna manages to maintain her
strong brand while simultaneously remaining culturally relevant, even one step ahead of the game. It is also why her audience never perceives her as getting old (as evidenced by the fact that the number of teenagers in her audience is legion, even though she’s old enough to be their mom). It’s also how she manages to remain, in some respects, “out of time.”

This is
exactly
how many successful brands are created. Trust me, I’ve used these very same techniques hundreds of times. I’ll ask a large consumer group to rip out photos and headlines from magazines to illustrate a “feeling” or a “sense” or a “value” that a client is looking to instill in its brand, then present the collage to a design company. In fact, I’ve often asked CEOs and CFOs if they could pick a person whose business and marketing acumen they admire and from whom they think they could learn valuable lessons, and nine out of ten say, “Madonna.” Why? She’s able to reinvent herself and react instantaneously to trends. As a result, her fans are emotionally engaged not just with her music but with the brand
Madonna
.

Speaking of celebrities being out of time, some have cleverly managed to become so timeless as to basically achieve immortality. Remember how, in the early 1980s,
Michael Jackson was filming a TV commercial for Pepsi when his hair accidentally caught on fire? Well, evidently, executive producer Ralph Cohen swept up Jackson’s seared locks, kept them under wraps for almost thirty years, and, when Jackson died in 2009, sold them to a collector named John Reznikoff, who then contracted with a Chicago-based jeweler called
LifeGem, which makes expensive diamonds out of hair samples. The upshot: LifeGem has announced plans to release (i.e., sell) a “limited edition” of diamonds made from Jackson’s hair or, as LifeGem founder
Dean VandenBiesen phrases it unforgettably, “Our plan is to give people an opportunity to own a diamond made from Michael Jackson’s DNA. . . . We anticipate great interest.”
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Is it any surprise at this point that in an auction held last year in Beverly Hills, an X-ray of Albert Einstein’s brain was sold for $38,750, while a pair of Marilyn Monroe’s empty prescription bottles (I kid you not) went for $18,750?
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These days, celebrities—particularly in the music industry—don’t exist without a marketing plan. More and more pop music stars are surrounding themselves with marketing experts to help them not just define
their image and their values but also decide what to do, where to go, and how to target specific audiences. In short, to manage their brand.

Music manager
Larry Rudolph is widely recognized as one of the best at this in the business. He is the guy credited not only with discovering
Britney Spears (whom he picked out from the many soon-to-be-famous alumni of
The
Mickey Mouse Club
for her plucky, “schoolgirl sexy” look) but with managing her brand from 1999 to 2004 and again in 2007. It was Rudolph who encouraged Spears to enter rehab when she famously hit rock bottom in 2007, at which point he and Spears parted ways. Once she got clean, though, she rehired him. Thus, it was Rudolph who engineered her comeback after many months of, shall we say, “unconventional” behavior—a marketing feat in and of itself. Integral to the success of the Spears comeback campaign was an “uncensored documentary” of her life entitled
Britney: For the Record
that MTV broadcast in 2008. Most viewers were struck by how down-to-earth, beleaguered, humbled, and human the singer came across—and came away with a new sympathy for the pressures that accompanied tabloid superstardom. Naturally MTV failed to note—and why should it?—that the selection of all this “uncensored” documentary footage had been carefully overseen by Britney’s manager, Larry Rudolph (I should add here that Rudolph also represents other megabrands such as Justin Timberlake and 98 Degrees).

Being brands in and of themselves is what allows many stars to charge top dollar for the honor of their presence at events ranging from movie screenings to fashion shows to bar or bat mitzvahs. A 2010 ranking by fashion blog Fashionista claims that appearance fees for A-list
celebrities including Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Maggie Gyllenhaal
begin
at $100,000. For that same ten minutes, says Fashionista, B-list celebrities, from Hilary Duff to the cast of
Gossip Girl
, receive somewhere in the vicinity of $25,000. However, there is a limit: the D-list—whose members range from Paris Hilton to the cast of MTV’s reality TV show
Jersey Shore
, are just plain unwelcome.
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I
n 2002 the hosts of the
Today
show decided to roll out a monthly book club. The day they announced the selections, those
books immediately
shot up to the top of the Amazon rankings, and the following week occupied prominent positions on the
New York Times
best-seller list. The only thing that could have catapulted their sales higher was if they’d been recommended by Oprah.

If you’ve ever visited one of those ginormous Barnes & Noble or Borders superstores or, for that matter, any oversized superstore, be it Target, Best Buy, or Walmart, it’s easy to understand why consumers appreciated being steered through the seemingly bottomless pool of choices and pointed in the direction of a worthy book.

It’s an intriguing truism that more choice often leaves consumers less satisfied
and
less likely to buy something. You heard that right: when it comes to shopping, less
is
always more (and you’ve wondered why you generally walk out of Best Buy empty-handed or why a twelve-page restaurant menu makes you want to walk right out and find the nearest McDonald’s). Quite simply, we are paralyzed by the fear of making a wrong, and expensive, choice.

To prove this point, in one of my all-time favorite experiments, I gave a dozen people two options: they could choose a chocolate from a box that contained thirty different types of chocolates, or they could pick one from a box that contained only six varieties. Can you guess what happened? A huge majority ended up picking from the box with only six chocolates—another argument that the fewer choices and selections we face, the more likely we are to pick up, and buy, something.

Recently I had a long conversation with the managers of a well-known bookstore chain. As I was leaving, I asked the employees to carry out a similar experiment for me: to remove all but one of the seven or eight display tables situated up front and in the center of the store. On that single table, I had store personnel place only a dozen or so books. (The average table in a bookstore holds at least forty.) A week later, we looked at the store’s overall revenue. In the course of only seven days, book sales had gone up 2 percent (which may not sound like a lot but is a
huge
margin for a bookstore) storewide. In short, when they didn’t have to deal with all those choices, hundreds more readers walked away with a purchase.

So given how petrified we are of making choices, wouldn’t it be great if someone else—and not just anyone, but a
celebrity—
made that choice
for us? After all, even the UK royal family issues a century-old “royal warrant,” a seal of approval, prestige, and high quality that appears on a range of luxury goods. “People apply for the warrant because it is a mark of excellence,” said Pippa Dutton of the Royal Warrants Association. “It’s very helpful for trade because people say, well, if the Queen shops there, then it must be good. It’s very good for trade abroad.”
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For a company or manufacturer, gaining recognition as a royal supplier means reaching the top of the aspirational hierarchy—while consumers, in turn, believe,
If the royal family uses it, it
must
be of the highest possible quality.
As a result, thousands of product samples show up every month at the royal doorsteps.