Not since the late 1980s has there been a clearer rift in the fandom of teenage girls as they pick a side in their pop music consumerism. You were either a Tiffany girl or a Debbie Gibson girl back then, never both. One (Tiffany) represented a simple kind of outlandish urban rebelliousness, largely contextualized by sex; the other (Gibson) represented a suburban wholesome happiness with no room for overt sexuality. At the same time, though, Tiffany and Gibson did not have the benefit of cross-format marketing, largely due to the lack of choice they and their marketing teams were up against. MTV was still undefined, concert promotion was word-of-mouth almost exclusively, and pop-song product placement in visual media was not yet popularized. Now, though, we have a teenage beef of a different sort, seen most clearly in the camps of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, the two most popular and widely recognized female pop-stars in the world. This lecture will focus on the specialized (and far different) marketing and branding strategies that have, and continue to, add to the individual perception of Swift and Perry, and especially the seemingly individualized perception of each artist’s fan community. I will employ branding theories and strategies as first written by Marc Gobe in his book Emotional Branding, as well as other writers who explore the depths and complexities that artists use today to try and establish a recognizable position in the emotional market share of pop-music. I will show that Taylor Swift in many ways has been the impetus to the contemporary notion of emotional market share in pop-music, as well as the figure that subsequent artists (particularly Perry) have looked to in order to try for a piece of that market share in their attempt to emotionally connect to fans. The result of this fighting for market share has been a very clear divide in the fandom of these artists, forcing (mostly) girls to pick a role in how they identify themselves. That has, then, branded the fans of these artists in an interesting and important way—from the brandedness of pop-stars comes the brandedness of pop-fans. I will also use, of course, cultural critics of the global culture industry, beginning with Theodor Adorno and continuing on through writers like Henry Jenkins, Chuck Klosterman, and others.
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