Tweet this: @PGopalan Product Marketing Lessons from @ladygaga
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Last week I went to a Lady Gaga concert, here in Austin. It was part of her Monster Ball tour. What a blast! At 9Million plus followers on Twitter, Lady Gaga is a phenomenon whether you like her music, her antics on stage, her bizarre costumes or not. What can we learn from Lady Gaga? Here are three ideas I observed in the Lady Gaga marketing machine.
1) Create an outstanding whole product experience
Lady Gaga’s concert is not just about theatrics. It is about a full on entertainment experience. A Broadway musical wrapped in a pop concert format. Rather than presenting a dozen songs one after another as most concerts go, she produced a thematic performance – there was dance, music (simple lyrics, that related to the majority of her audience), stunning stage production, but more importantly an entertaining story telling experience. In the tour concert last week, it was about a group of friends going to the Monster Ball and their experiences along the way, reaching the climactic song at the Monster Ball. It was an outstanding whole product experience.
How often do you have a product release that has no theme, but a bullet point list of something like ‘New features in Version 2.3’? Can you tie in those features into a release theme so it is useful as a whole product? Or were those features simply a collection of items you had to pick to appease as many interests as you could? The choice for product managers is usually between delivering a thematic release or a feature filled release. The former delivers an ‘experience’. That latter falls flat ready to be ignored.
2) Connect with audience at multiple levels through multiple channels
I was impressed how Lady Gaga connected with members of the audience at a personal level . Between songs, two huge electronic display boards were live streaming tweets from the audience. It was giving the audience a shared sense of community and engaging their participation. Pre-concert, there was a costume challenge and selected participants were invited to the well/up-close to the performing artists.
During the concert, Lady Gaga pulls out a cell phone (mentions Virgin Mobile – sponsor) and makes a call to a ‘lucky’ fan. The fan, who is in the audience, answers the call, is in spotlight and gets invited to meet Lady Gaga backstage. The fan tells Lady Gaga that her friend with whom she has come to the concert is also a big fan. Lady Gaga extends the backstage invitation to her fan’s friend too. How generous! Not only that, Lady Gaga donates $25,000 to charity (matching donation from Virgin too) because someone answered her call that night. Next she reads out a letter from someone in the audience who credits Lady Gaga for inspiring her. Spotlight moves to the fan, fan gets invited to meet Lady Gaga backstage. 16,000+ audience goes gaga.
Theatrics aside, you can’t miss the obvious fact that Lady Gaga is trying to connect with her audience at a personal level. If we apply that to product management, how often and in what ways do product managers try to connect with customers, and reward them for just being customers? (no sales call/no hidden agenda). Saeed had a great post about visiting customers with no sales agenda last week.
3) Build and nurture your tribe
That brings us to the third point – building and nurturing your tribe. Lady Gaga calls her fans ‘little monsters’ and herself ‘mama monster’. (And they are all going to the Monster Ball. How thematic!) By creating an identity for her fans, she has created a brand for her followers – a tribe that her fans can belong to. She didn’t build the 9M+ twitter following overnight. These are fans that are carefully nurtured and given plenty of legally free digital streams of Lady Gaga’s music to listen and enjoy (the free trial). Lady Gaga is constantly communicating/tweeting to let her fans know what she is up to, what she is thinking, where she is performing and thanking them for support. It is a lot of effort and high degree of engagement with a large fan base, but the dividends are there to see. How many product brands can match Lady Gaga’s effectiveness in building and nurturing a tribe?
In summary, here are three questions worth introspection if you are delivering a product – how can you create an outstanding experience for your customers with your product? how can you connect with your customers in that experience, make them be part of it? how can you build a loyal following, so the relationship is beyond a transactional opportunity?
Tweet this: @PGopalan Product Marketing Lessons from @ladygaga
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