For Valentine’s day my wife decided to take our two daughters to the Justin Bieber movie “Never Say Never”.  She asked me if I wanted to come and I said well it would not be my first choice but I would rather spend Valentine’s night with my family.  As I was watching the movie it outlined how he came to fame and how hard this young Canadian boy worked to get where he was, I thought this kid is getting a bad rap from a lot of people just because he is popular.  My opinion of him completely changed and I thought it was cute how all the girls in the theatre (including my two daughters) screamed when the movie was over.

My thought was the marketing environment that Justin became famous by is the new reality.  You do not need the Disney channel or a famous parent to get your start in acting or music and become famous.  Sure you need unreal talent, but not all talent is found (shows like American Idol are proof of this).   With social media the talent will get found.  Justin was originally noticed on YouTube and then used Twitter to tell all his new fans what radio station he would be playing at next.  The crowds grew from 10 to 10,000 and eventually he could not do the radio station gigs anymore.

The Bieber marketing team were smart too they catered to the young crowd with free tickets and invites on stage which I am sure were tweeted about and posted on Facebook by all the fans involved.  When you talk about the new reality of social media and the power of social media I think the Bieber story is a sign of things to come.  He went from no fans to selling out Madison Square garden in 22 minutes in a year.  That would never have been possible without social media.

I always say the world is going to be a different place to market when the 8, 11, 16 year olds are 10 years older and are consumers and influencers.  Well with a musician like Justin Bieber they are the consumers and from now on every business is going to have to be creative to get in front of these new consumers.  Online marketing is important now, but we are only experiencing the tip of the ice berg.  If you visualize the Bell Curve we are still at the early adopter stage and have not hit the mature stage.

As for Bieber he is a good Canadian story, he looks like he has a caring family and smart management team that can hopefully keep him grounded as he grows up.  I am sure my daughters will keep me up to speed.

This entry was posted by John McDonald on Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 at 9:33 am and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.