Famous or commonly used?
One of the most popular bands of the past couple decades was recently inducted into the *music hall of fame. They’ve sold over 50 million albums and one of their music videos has 544 million views on YouTube. It’s no Despacito, but it’s not an accident either — people have (privately, at least) sought it out.
So when they were also named the second-worst band of the nineties by Rolling Stone readers, they must have had a few tears to wipe away with their stacks cash. The band, of course, is Nickelback, a chart-topper also relegated to meme fodder. At once knighted and stoned to death.
(*Canadian. No slight to my friends north of the border.)
I find this paradox — being commercially successful but publicly derided —potentially revealing about how we buy things. So I looked at some other examples of entertainers who have been popular in the past 18 months or so: MrBeast, Lizzo, the Island Boys, and Tariq the Corn Kid.
Not unlike Nickelback, Island Boys (yellow) and Corn Kid (red) burned songs into our cerebellums for periods too long for our tastes. They follow similar popularity arcs — flat line, a few weeks of culture-blinding fame, then nothing again.
Lizzo (blue) and MrBeast (green), each have massive followings and consistent releases, along occasional global buzz moments, are similarly more alike to each other than either is to the Island Boys or Corn Kid.
This dynamic reminds me of a couple brands. One is former client, a CPG brand primarily sold at drug stores, that enjoys the top market share position but is #9 in awareness. Another is PRIME, the energy drink led by Logan Paul and KSI, that’s a status symbol fetching high resale prices even for empty bottles, from kids looking to post selfies with them.
Prime drinks cost about $2.40 per bottle — or, at least, they’re supposed to. In some areas, demand is so wild that people are reselling bottles for $12 or $20 — or $100.
One of these brands lives in millions of households in every neighborhood in the country. The other is (or was?) the envy of adolescents worldwide. (Fwiw, I added Prime to the chart above and it was an almost imperceptible flat line.)
I’ve seen fame defined as “known to be known.” If you buy or watch something, you have reasonable confidence that other people know about it.
Ben Evans charted the top Netflix views against MrBeast’s aggregate video views. Although his videos net millions of views, I’m not sure that makes him famous.
If you bring up “Beef” at work or among friends, you’ll likely find yourself in a conversation about the power of representation, even if (like me) you haven’t yet seen the show. If you bring up MrBeast, you’ll probably get crickets. (To be fair, the opposite might be true during recess at your local junior high.)
Commercially, MrBeast’s lack of big-F fame probably doesn’t matter. He’s such a popular entity that he’s decided to create and sell products directly to his audience, and they’re selling like mad. Further, if the ability to spur rapid, widespread adoption of something new isn’t fame, what is it?
For the CPG brand I mentioned above, the solution was pretty clear. They had nailed distribution, but with sales starting to sag, to fuel their next phase of growth they needed people to know who they are and buy them on purpose rather than by habit. Like Lizzo and MrBeast, they have consistency (here: significant distribution). But unlike them, few blips of attention. They needed some fame and we had a big idea on how they could get their share of it. (If and when the campaign goes live, I’ll be less cagey.)
Who’s famous and who’s just commonly used? How important is it to be liked or talked about publicly? There’s so much more to explore here.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
