Branding (RESEARCH)

In most situations, branding is often heard when a company decides to put a label or sign on a particular product in order for the audience to easily acknowledge the item when seen. Similarly, the music industry tend to do the same with the artists. Ways they do this is by giving an artist a particular aspect that would be seen in cross media such as the album and magazine covers, music video and even trailers for the song. An example of this would be Beyoncé. As Beyoncé has always been successful for most of her career as a musician, we, as an audience, noticed there were no distinct aspects to her character. Although she was strongly acknowledge as a artist, she didn't have a distinct image like other artists like Michael Jackson. Here we can see the distinct image of the artist with the colour scheme consisting on white and black, the hat, shiny jacket and white shiny glove:

 

 

Going back to Beyoncé, she realised that she needed a way to brand herself across the media. So in the process of doing so, she decided to invent an alter ego called 'Sasha fierce'. This persona tends to be the opposite of Beyoncé's loving and down to earth mannerisms. Sasha is portrayed to have an attitude and have a violent look about her. From time to time Beyoncé will switch alter egos, this gives the audience a choice with which character they would want to like more and also boost the audience range . Here is the great Beyoncé, or Sasha fierce if you will, at work being branded across the media:

 

(Album cover)

 

(Magazine cover)

 

(Music video- 'Put a ring on it')

 

 

As we can see from the different media appearances of Beyoncé (Sasha fierce), the branding of this persona tends to consists on long slightly dark hair, heavily dark massacre around the eyes, revealing and dark outfits and noticeable grey scale effect. All these aspects are used to brand the artist, the grey scale effect and all dark clothing will give the audience an incorporated image that will make them become more distinct and recognisable. In addition, this idea of the alter ego branding for Beyoncé corresponds with the theory of Laura Mulvey discussing the ways artists represent themselves. In this case, Beyoncé deciding to oppose from her kind and innocent nature and spawn a character of darkness, aggression and bad behaviour- something that is not commonly seen with Beyoncé. She represented herself as being a rebellious and outrageous character.