brand marketing blog

Nothing you might say. Actually I think it has a lot to do with brand marketing. It's not so much his death, but the downward spiral of what was once a respected iconic brand.

The Michael Jackson brand used to have huge value, with massive record sales, concert attendances etc, but as his strange and debauched lifestyle started to take control of his life, the brand became tainted. Tainted almost to the extent that it was a negative to be associated with it (unless you were one of his die-hard fans).

There is a parallel here in how commercial brand value can easily be eroded by not consistently delivering the experience that your brand promises. When the marketing spin doctors tell a great brand story that everyone buys into, it is imperative that the actual experience is consistent with it.

What Michael Jackson failed to do was deliver what his brand promised. A trail of bad personal decisions and negative publicity destroyed him and his brand. If you are a company and are serious about building long term value into your brand you will need to be committed to sticking to your brand promise at every instance where your target market interacts with it. Not just in the offline world, but in the online world as well.

Your brand value is based on what people feel and believe emotionally about it. If you destroy that emotional bond through carelessness and inconsistency your brand will most likely never recover from it.

RIP Thriller.