No matter who you are, whether you founded a startup, own an established small business, or work for a large corporation, you can learn something from Beyonce and her most recent album, Lemonade. Here are a few lemons you can use to get started:
1. Find what makes you stand-out from your competition or something that can put you ahead. Beyonce uses innovative videos to go along with her music and she’s way ahead of the game, which gives her an impressive edge.
“Beyoncé has long experimented with ways to amplify video’s impact. With her second solo effort, 2006’s B’Day, she released an alternate "visual album" version that included a separate video for each track—something she would repeat with her self-titled 2013 album. In hindsight, it’s clear that Beyoncé was testing video’s potential, getting comfortable with the format in a post-MTV digital world as a way to expand her artistic vision and marketing muscle. Her 2008 song "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," with its Bob Fosse–inspired black-and-white video, is among the earliest—and biggest—examples of music-video-as-Internet meme, transforming the song from a hit into a phenomenon.”
2. Once you control your brand and your story, you can establish a reputation of reliability and creativity with your audience. Beyonce is in control of her narrative even when a video of her sister Solange attacking her husband Jay Z in an elevator reached the public. She used that video to create Lemonade.
“Most successful brands deal with public blowback at some point. Recently, Chipotle has been scrambling to overcome fallout from a series of food-poisoning incidents, while Facebook is battling the perception that its news-feed system privileges liberal content over conservative posts. There are lots of ways to deal with these kinds of PR debacles, of course—crisis management is an entire public-relations subindustry. But Beyoncé’s response to the elevator video has been a fascinating experiment in PR disaster–as-opportunity narrative redefinition—a transformation of lemons into Lemonade.”
3. Learn to take risks carefully. Because she is an investor in Tidal, Beyonce could have forced all of her fans to subscribe in order to see her new album, which would have alienated many. Instead she used an extremely delicate strategy to encourage her fans to subscribe to Tidal while also giving them as many opportunities as possible to see Lemonade without the subscription.
“When disruption hits, some businesses cling to the old, hoping to ride things out. Others race to the new without fully comprehending the implications. Beyoncé straddles both approaches.”
4. Last, Beyonce excels at being unpredictable. That you will be impressed is the only thing you can be sure of when it comes to Queen Bey.
“Throughout the business world, marketers are looking at Lemonade’s success and wondering how to concoct something similarly effective and iconic. "We’re asking ourselves, ‘So what’s our Lemonade?’ " says Airbnb’s Mildenhall. "Because we don’t ever want to become predictable. Every time we engage with our consumers, our target audience, our community, we want to surprise them, to inspire them, to delight them. And we want to do it in a way that then drives a disproportionate share of popular conversation."
How do you turn lemons into lemonade at your business?
Image by Arnie Papp
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