Beyoncé's country pivot and lessons in fearless marketing

Provocative ideas are what get people talking. They divide the crowds and stir culture like nothing else.

Take, for example, Beyoncé’s brand-spankin''’, boot-scootin''’ country album, Cowboy Carter.

First, let me be clear—I’m not a diehard Beyonce fan. So, please take any and all references, comparisons, and opinions with a grain of salt. I merely admire her ability to take creative risks with unparalleled confidence.

If you’ve been living under a rock with your phone switched off, yes, Beyoncé has released a country album to a murmur of controversy and an explosion of conversation. As with most of her music, people have labelled it a masterpiece, and when you see how potent it is in popular culture, you would have to agree. Putting aside Beyoncé’s album launch tactics, which generate seismic shifts in conversation, let’s focus on the bold, innovative move to push into another genre and disrupt it.

What can the world of advertising and marketing learn from this?

Ground-breaking creativity requires a healthy disrespect for the rules. In other words, risk. Just take a look at the results from Mark Riston X Effie Worldwide’s study of 6,000 winning Effie papers over the past 50 years. Those who danced with danger outperformed those who didn’t.

Let’s consider where creative risk-taking has paid off. Premium health club brand Equinox wanted to remind the world that they stood for ‘life’, not just ‘fitness’. In their words, “A belief isn’t a belief until it costs you money.” So, they decided to fight against fads and fitness trends by denying new members the ability to sign up on New Year's Day's busiest day of the year. The audacity of the ‘We don’t speak January’ campaign was met with an onslaught of backlash online, which would have had the marketing team sweatin’ in their active-wear, but they stood their ground and stayed true to their brand DNA.

This blip in negativity was swiftly overthrown by a frenzy of positive commentary, which landed a 504% increase in brand conversation and, get this, their best-ever January results in terms of sales and leads.

Marketers fear failure.

But real growth comes from defying conventions with disruptive creativity. Often, this will come with a little dislike, but remember, audiences admire confidence. A wise person once told me that if nobody hates you, then nobody truly loves you. Pop out from under the rock and switch your phone back on, and you’ll see that Beyoncé is getting her dose of dislike from some of the more ‘backwater’ country music community. But this is far outweighed by the love she is getting from the world more broadly. If you want to grow, turn heads, and open minds, you will have to be comfortable with words like ‘dislike’.

As we know, Beyoncé never ceases to surprise us. She embraces new ideas like no other and executes them in her unique way with remarkable confidence. Isn’t that what brands should be doing? In marketing speak, disrupt your category, take risks, yet stay true to your brand positioning.

Leveraging social and cultural taboos is one of many ways to do this, but one that scares most marketers. We need to embrace this fear.

Who Gives A Crap is a brand embracing this. We recently teamed up with an eco-friendly toilet paper company to alert people to the fact that over one million trees are cut down every single day to make traditional toilet paper. With deforestation relatively low on most people’s ‘list of things to really care about’, a provocative idea was needed to ensure earned attention.

At the time, the media was in a stir over the number of classic children’s books that were updating the original texts, usually due to racist or sexist language. However, no books had ever been revised for environmental reasons. So, Who Gives A Crap enlisted the most famous Pooh in the world (pun intended) and republished A.A. Milne’s 1926 classic as Winnie-the-Pooh: The Deforested Edition. Sustainably made from 100% recycled materials, the much-loved story remained the same but with one major difference—every single tree was cut down.

Who Gives A Crap knew that poking the bear (another one!) would bring a dose of ‘anti-woke’ sentiment, but the campaign started a positive conversation globally, boosted brand awareness, in addition to saving plenty of trees through those who switched to their 100% recycled offering.

I’m definitely not suggesting we aim for shock value or sensationalism; you can be provocative and still grounded in emotive, relevant and authentic communication. Have a look at how IKEA approached this irreverent gem with ‘The Pee Ad’ aimed at pregnant women. Can you imagine the meeting where the team were told the audience was going to pee on their ad? Scary. Good scary.

Sure, there are risks that don’t pay off. They’re often the ones trying to be provocative without the support to reinforce a claim. Even Kim Kardashian, the most powerful PR machine in the world, can miss the mark. Maybe trivialising the climate crisis to promote a tokenistic gesture for the Skims Nipple Bra wasn’t her best move, but even this had an upside, finding an unexpected audience.

You can’t please everyone. A phenomenal campaign will still have a few cynics. A ground-breaking, genre-defying album will have a handful of naysayers. Even the highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes, Paddington 2, will have its opposition.

“Thanks, George. Very helpful. What would’ve happened if George was in a focus group for the film? I hate to think.”

I digress. The point I’m making is that we should all add a cowboy hat to our list of distinctive brand assets, jump on a horse side-saddle, and create some commotion. It’s what Beyoncé would do.

**tips hat**

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Max Reed is the creative director at Eleven and TBWA Melbourne.