It’s happened to all of us. We hear a song we like, but we don’t know who sings it so we don’t know how to find it and buy it. One pop artist has a clever way of making sure you know who sings her songs and you remember who the artist is every time you hear it.
Love her or hate her, you have to admire the branding strategy of Lady Gaga. She incorporates the lyric “ga-ga” into her several of her songs. The memorable branding lyric typically appears in the song’s opening phrasing, making it one of the most recognizable pieces of the song. To date she’s release 3 CD’s and all have songs with the ga-ga lyric. Check out the following examples:
Just Dance – lyric at about 20 seconds:
Eh Eh Nothing – lyric at about 10 seconds:
Bad Romance – lyric at about 30 seconds:
Judas – lyric at about 1 minues (this one has a long intro):
The fact that these memorable lines are often made up of non-words reinforces Gaga’s personal brand of being an unusual “beyond the box” person.
Whatever you think of Lady Gaga you have to admire this form of strategic branding. It’s helped make her one of the most popular performers on the stage today. She’s been labeled one of the most downloaded musicians on YouTube and at the time of this writing she has 41,460,172 fans on Facebook.
I’ve always said that if your marketing is good – someone is going to start copying you. I wonder if the artist who decides to copy her will be able to pull it off as well as she did, or if it will just feel like a fake imitation.