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What Susan Boyle Can Teach Us About Marketing
 The phenomenon of so-called “frumpy” Scottish chanteuse Susan Boyle -- who rocked the judges, the audience and the world with her Britain’s Got Talent audition where she sang “I Dreamed A Dream” from Les Misérables -- is nothing short of amazing. In the space of just 9 days, she has come from unemployment and total obscurity to become a worldwide sensation and one of the best known women on the planet. Since the broadcast of her audition, she’s been interviewed by countless news outlets on both sides of the Atlantic, including BBC, CNN, and Good Morning America. Next up – an appearance on Oprah (of course).
The most viewed YouTube video of her performance has garnered almost 34 million views as of this writing, and there are at least 12 more YouTube videos of Susan that have between 1 million and 9 million views each. That totals to more than 70 million views of her on YouTube alone in just over a week. To put that in context, the most viewed video on YouTube of all time is Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” which has 118.5 million views and has been on the site for more than 2 years.
So what can Susan’s ascendance to worldwide stardom teach us about marketing? There are a few lessons here:
- Emotion sells – If you really want to connect with an audience, there’s nothing more powerful than eliciting a positive, emotional response. I’ve yet to speak with someone about the performance who didn’t admit to getting goosebumps, or some other physical reaction, when they first heard Susan sing.
- Surprise sells – I’m a huge fan of under promising and over delivering. Once Susan walked out on stage a low expectation was set in people’s minds just based on her appearance and persona. Once she opened her mouth to sing, those expectations were shattered in a very good way.
- A great product is half the battle – no amount of marketing can make up for a crappy product. And we can’t say a great product sells itself, for, in that world, Susan would have been a star already. In this case, very little marketing (albeit with the help of a big initial TV exposure) created an overnight success of a great product because it connected with people in a very broad, but also very personal, way. I believe the “product” here is not only Susan’s voice but also the particular song she chose. Not only is “I Dreamed A Dream” a catchy tune that millions of people know and like, but its message is one that a lot of people can relate to today. Susan walked on that stage with a dream and walked off the stage light years closer to achieving it.
- Timing is everything – I have to wonder whether the Susan phenomenon we’ve seen these
 last 9 days would have occurred if she auditioned for the 2007 season instead of the 2009 one? In fact, the 2007 season brought us a very similar story in the person of opera singer Paul Potts, who surprised everyone with his amazing voice, went on to win the competition and has since become a very successful singer selling millions of albums. And, while the story and the video of his audition spread very broadly online, it wasn’t close to the broadreach phenomenon of Susan Boyle. It seems to me that this year Ms. Boyle struck a particular chord that people around the world could relate to. In these days of economic turmoil, never-ending bad news and overall feeling of doom and gloom, there’s something about this potential rags-to-riches/ugly-duckling-becoming-a-swan fairytale that tens of millions of people connected with in uniquely personal ways.
There’s another marketing lesson that I hope won’t come to pass but fear it will – overexposure killing the brand. At this point the hype is so great for Susan’s next performance that the risk of her not meeting expectations (see bullet #1 above) is huge. The next time she takes the stage for the semi-finals will no doubt be one of the most viewed TV shows in British history and millions of people will be watching to see what Susan does for an encore. How can she top where she is now? I hope she has some marketing pros guiding her along as it would be a huge letdown for the tens of millions of people rooting for her if, in the end, she doesn’t realize the dream she dreams.
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