Adele: Marketing Expert?

I came across an interesting article on Ad Age about what brands can learn from the top artists in the music industry. I've never thought of music and marketing to be related, so this was a fun read.

The article discussed how musicians try to "leverage all the connection points they have with fans", and this relates directly to our course material. We always discuss how brands try to have as many touchpoints as possible with consumers through integrated marketing. It also mentioned how musicians try to generate buzz, which is something I'm not surprised about. The music industry is one that people are constantly talking about. But, this makes me wonder how there isn't a lot of waste coverage. How can musicians market solely to their target market? I can imagine that the music industry is difficult in terms of target market segmentation, because there are certain people that like all kinds of music. More importantly, there are a wide range of demographic groups that like artists. For instance, my mom is a huge One Direction fan, but you wouldn't consider her to be in their "typical" target market (granted, she's probably a little too old to be listening to it anyways HA!).

It was no surprise to me that Adele was at the top of the list. Her new single, Hello, has touched us all- I'd have to say it's one of my all time favorite songs of hers. Not only is her music phenomenal, her marketing is too. I never thought about what she did these past few months in terms of marketing, but this article made me think about her strategy. I learned that she threw a free concert in New York a few days before her album was released. This seems like the music industry's version of personal selling. It also mentioned that she collected email addresses of her fans, which is yet another touchpoint and a way of her to utilize direct marketing.

Another marketing strategy used by Adele was her impersonator contest that took place after her album was launched. Again, I saw this online but I never thought about it from a marketing standpoint. This is genius- and as the article stated, it generated a ton of buzz. Like we talk about in class, you need to get people talking about your brand. In this video, Adele pretended to be one of the people impersonating her in a contest. She struck everyone in the audience by surprise when she sang, because they all realized she was the real Adele! I thought this was a clever and funny marketing effort.

Overall, I found the rankings in this list to be very accurate- although I think Justin Bieber should be higher on the list (maybe that's just because I consider myself to be a Belieber). I think that it's really interesting to look at different industries, such as the music industry and see how marketing efforts work for them!