Rebranding John Mayer
Rebranding, or changing your image, is tough. In most industries, there is a scale from economy to luxury, and a brand will fall into some range along that scale. And there shall that brand stay for evermore. Motel Six is never going to compete with the Four Seasons. Subway isn’t going after the Ruth’s Chris regulars. When Nissan wanted to go upscale, they launched a new brand, Infiniti. Same with Honda and Acura. Mid-level brands that try to go uptown do so at their own peril.
A couple of years ago, our president, Bobby Frank, had a case of new-car fever, and he was considering a Volkswagen Phaeton. The dealer was having a good deal on his stock of Phaetons because nobody was buying them. Nobody was buying them because it was a $70,000 car. It was a beautiful car, but is was a $70,000 Volkswagen. There is no way the “car of the people” can pull off hyper-luxury and get away with it. Do they make Phaetons anymore. No. It was a costly failed experiment.
I caught the last couple of minutes of John Mayer’s segment on Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival on PBS the other night. He was playing some screaming blues guitar. I have been watching Mayer with some interest the last few years from a music standpoint. (Like everyone else in this agency, and in Nashville, I am a musician.) But I started to think of it from a different point of view — from a marketing point of view. And what Mayer has done the last couple of years is undertake a bold attempt at rebranding himself.
Rebranding is nothing new in entertainment. When successful, it is said that someone has “reinvented” himself, like when a stand-up comedian gets cast as a villain in a feature film. When it works that person is hailed as a genius. However, it is a risky road to follow if a performer is worried about his fan base or cash flow.
John Mayer got incredibly famous for his frat/pop music with songs like, “Your Body is a Wonderland,” and “No Such Thing.” Well, he decided a couple of years ago that he was going to release a greasy, dirty, screaming-guitar blues record. He hired two legendary musicians, Steve Jordan (drums) and Pino Palladino (bass) and went to the studio and got down and dirty. And he did the morning and late night show circuit to back it up. And people let out a collective, “huh?”
In current popular music (leaving out genres like Gregorian Chant and Aboriginal Folk Music) there is a scale similar to the economy/luxury scale. It isn’t so much a scale of quality of music as it is a scale of musical refinement. (I’m not saying one end of the scale is “better” than the other. I’m talking about refinement of harmonic complexity, instrumentation, production values, etc.) I think it is tougher as a musician to reinvent yourself down the scale of musical refinement than up. If Mayer had started as a greasy blues guitar player, and then evolved into a pop star, he might have pulled it off on a bigger scale. Two examples are Green Day and Goo Goo Dolls, who both went from punk to pop. But to go the other way — Connecticut pop star wants to be taken seriously as a down-home blues guy — is tough. The blues purists won’t take him seriously and the pop fans won’t like it.
In my opinion, Mayer is a fine blues guitarist, but I don’t think he’ll ever get the traction or fan base as a blues guy that he did with his pop stuff. And, truth is, he probably doesn’t care. If he did care, he might have gone the other way, up the scale, and professed his love for the standards, releasing a record full of Sinatra and Nat King Cole tunes.
Thankfully that didn’t happen.
(This is the blog for Frank/Best International, an ad agency in Music City USA.)
December 4th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I had completely forgotten about the Phaeton until you mentioned it. The deal on that car was unbelievable. A three year lease with no money down and 12,000 miles a year for $479 a month. I believe the sticker price on the car was $78,000, which was completely inconsistent with consumer expectations of the brand. Amazingly, Audi continues to have success with virtually the same car (the A8) with a price tag exceeding the Phaeton’s and lease deals in the $799+ range. It is a great case study in brand value.