Lindsay Lohan Reveals Her Brand

News of recently-teenaged actress Lindsay Lohan's impersonation of still-deceased actress Marilyn Monroe via a nude photo spread in New York magazine says a lot about how brands can devolve.

It seems like only yesterday that Lindsay was that cuddly little ingenue in Disney's remake of The Parent Trap.  Well, it was practically yesterday, only since then she has sped through her mildly endearing early teens to slam into a few guardrails with her car, not to mention alcoholism, rehab and, oh yes, a few utterly forgettable movies.

Now, at the ripe old age of 21, she's all but washed-up, revealing herself quite literally in a photo shoot emulating another actress who killed herself soon after her own nudie pics were taken.

If we looked at Lindsay and all actors as "brands," what might it tell us?

Actors and actresses offer particular sets of qualities from which movie-goers can choose, just as readers can pick authors (or listeners prefer one musician over another).  There's a Tom Hanks brand that pretty much guarantees a certain type of acting experience, just as Cate Blanchett offers a unique style, etc.  Playing with or against such perceptions keeps us interested, and buying tickets, as long as the acting substantiates our expectations and expenditure of time.

Celebrity is something else, tho, and it's only marginally attached to these brands.  If the acting itself defines the brand qualities, notoriety and other celeb-related coverage could be seen as the associative qualities. 

Now, if we were talking about consumer products instead, say, toothpaste:

• Functional benefits -- like cavity-fighting -- would be substantive branding, like the outcomes from acting
• Promises that the resulting smile would help you get the boy or girl would be the  celebrity associations

As such, you can see where the latter gets you without the former.

There are rare examples of brands that have a modicum of sustainability without offering any substantive benefits.  In the entertainment world, there's Charo, (was) Tiny Tim and, to a extent, we now get to enjoy Paris Hilton's famousness for being famous.  In consumer products, there's Monster Cable. 

More surprisingly, there are lots of consumer marketing offers that evidence a disconnect between function and promise.  Lots of so-so products and services are marketed by wildly inventive, creative branding.  You've seen it.  Maybe you've had a hand in creating it for a client or an employer. 

We marketers pride ourselves with our ability to make something out of nothing.

Lindsay's brand got disconnected from her actual acting ability or output soon after she made Freaky Friday (which was a hilarious movie in which she did an amazing job, in my humble opinion).  After that, her brand got defined by her increasingly-inane, self-destructive behavior.  The actuality of her acting disappeared. 

She became her image, and nobody really likes it anymore.  Hence the Marilyn Monroe knock-off photo shoot.  We're talking bottom of the barrel stuff.  With nothing but image to manipulate, she's running up against the literally physical limits of what she can do with it...er, herself.

I wonder if (and which) consumer products brands run the risk of treading Lohan's road and experiencing her Devolution Track (DTs...get it?).

• Is there a correlation between how memorable an ad or other marketing artifact might be, and the intensity or amount of scrutiny consumers apply to the actual functions of the product or service?
• How about when marketing, especially the latest, gee-wiz social stuff, reaches for themes distantly related to the functions of the brand itself (like a tissue maker wasting time and money on videos and chats about moments that make people want to cry?)...does this accentuate a disconnect that consumers perceive?
• Once a brand gets recognition for something, does that elevate expectations for the next event to be ever-bigger, funnier, or edgier, thereby lessening the integrity of the brand?  I'd call this the Super Bowl Effect, only "SBE" isn't anywhere near as punny as "DT."
• At what point does brand marketing from competing products, just like reports on stupid celebrity antics, start looking the same?  Viral video campaigns from two companies that make computers or TVs are as ignorable, and as disassociated from the functions of the products themselves, as reports on Brittany Spears and her stupid little sister, aren't they?  In the end, who cares about any of it?

Acting matters to entertainment brands.  So do the actual functions of products and services support, or destroy, consumer products branding. 

In both worlds, if the branding gets disassociated from reality, or dependent on associations with non-functional attributes to gain exposure, the brands suffer.  They devolve. 

Once that disconnect is fully revealed, they're all but done. 

Comments

[Jonathan]

I agree, fellow Hootervillian.

But after the third or fourth go-around, it's not so risky anymore as much as routine, right? There's nothing else Lindsay can do after the umpteenth run-in, except try to produce some artsy, high-quality role in a low-budget movie that reaffirms her bona fides as an actress, and 'resets' the dissolution clock so she can start destroying herself all over again.

Or she can go the Marilyn Monroe route, which would just be sad. 'Controlled risks' are fun, but truly uncontrolled risk-takers are scary, and potentially dead.

I miss "The Parent Trap" days.

[BG from Hooterville 1982]

JSB thanks for ruining my fond memories of family nights with the kids watching umpteen re-runs of the "Parent Trap." Remember one thing about celebrity brands: guardrail adventures on the way to detox make for a good bad-girl image. The attraction to this celeb brand genre is akin to how we feel toward gambling in humongous casinos tucked into the Connecticut woods: it's vicarious, controlled exhibition of risk behavior. To that end, the Lohan brand does a job for us.

[Jonathan]

Tom, thanks for the comment and the compliment!

You pose a really good question: what if the reality of the brand has few, if any, functional attributes, or none that can be differentiated. I'm not sure there's a single uber-answer, but my gut tells me that 'differentiation' has to happen in physical reality vs. the imaginary space of thinking. It just costs too much/doesn't last long enough to try to create and perpetuate perceptions of difference that aren't backed up by reality. All effective marketing communication can do is present and help people explore those differences.

So where does that leave commodity products? Well, soft drinks and soap, for instance, still have real sensory differences (Coke does taste different than Pepsi, and Dove lathers differently than Ivory), so there are attributes that can be claimed and communicated. It's far more likely that a customer will be a repeat soda pop or soap buyer because they've convinced themselves that they like the smell/taste/touch/sight of the packaging, yadda yadda, vs. an attachment to an imaginary attribute?

More fundamentally, however, I question the very concept of branding when it comes to products or services that only offer minor adaptations or nuances of sensory difference (to my point above, Coke and Pepsi don't taste ALL that different...).

Instead of relying on the magic of communications to move product, why not 'create brand' in the where, when, how of distribution, for instance. I think that's what Google has done: nobody 'chooses' it because it's a better search engine, but rather most people use it by default (i.e. they're not even conscious of it because it appears in their browser). How much of Coke's 'brand equity" is the result of similarly unconscious consumption (it's the fountain cola drink at so-and-so restaurant)?

I'm imagining a branding strategy that focused on distribution, operations, customer service, and all of the other non-marketing functions, to invent unique models that differentiate products and services.

We'd then redefine 'the brand' as the combination of the how, where, when, and why consumers interact with the company -- from product conception and dev, to repair and/or repeat purchase -- and not something they interact WITH. The brand IS the behavior(s) itself.

Marketing would be tasked with communicating those unique attributes, but the brand would exist in reality.

I'm percolating this idea, so any and all riffs are welcome. Again, thanks for the post.

[Account Deleted]

"if the branding gets disassociated from reality, or dependent on associations with non-functional attributes to gain exposure, the brands suffer."

And what if they reality of the brand is that it possess few, if any, functional attributes? Or none that can be truly differentiated; e.g. soft drinks, candy, fashion items, soap, etc.

P.S. Love your writing.