Lady Gaga Marketing

Lady Gaga is one of the most successful pop singers and song writers of the 21st century, selling 90 million recordings and being honored with five Grammy Awards. (Hondro, 2012) . A search for “Lady Gaga marketing” on google.com yields 28’600’000 results.

She was born in New York in 1986, named Stefani Germanotta. (Singer, 2012) Her father Joseph Germanotta is an internet entrepreneur, owning “Guest Wifi”, a company providing high speed wireless internet for hotels.

Her education comprised four semesters of studying music at the “Tisch School of the Arts” at New York University. Instead of completing her studies, she left in the second semester of her sophomore year to start working on her career in "music, art, sex and celebrity". (Chadrack, 2011) As her parents did not agree with her decision to leave school without a degree, she worked as burlesque Go-Go-Girl and started consuming drugs (Collins, 2008)

2008, she decided to move to Los Angeles to work on her debut album “The Fame”, which was released in August 2008. This was the first international success with 15 million records sold. By now, she is one of the most successful singers and songwriters in pop business. Her success story is not an accident, but she and her management have been using the following marketing principles.

Brand name: a brand name is supposed to uniquely identify and distinguish a product or service or – in this case – an artist from others. “Lady Gaga” is an easy to remember combination of “Lady”, a stately title, known and understood also in non-native English speaking countries, and “Gaga”, a slang word for infatuated that can be pronounced correctly in most languages. There is a story behind the invention of the name, which is – true or not – amusing:

"Every day, when Stef came to the studio, instead of saying hello, I would start singing 'Radio Ga Ga'. That was her entrance song" and that the text message was the result of a predictive text glitch that changed "radio" to...