By now most adults are sick of hearing about the shenanigans of teen star Justin Bieber, who’s managed to stay in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. From wild visits to strip clubs to recklessly driving his Ferrari to an alleged DUI and resisting arrest charge to egging his neighbors house to police raids on his mansion, the Biebs has been front and center on the gossip pages of tabloids and blog sites everywhere.
While Bieber might consider his behavior as a simple ascension into manhood (most adult males have had their share of teenage “events” that they would rather forget), it seems that he’s failed to consider what it’s doing to his career along the way. Yes, he’s doing a great job of crushing it into tiny pieces, as the putrid box office take of around $6 million of his recent film Believe shows. Considering that his last film Never Say Never grossed about $73 million in the US alone just two years ago, and he’s released a series of recent songs that never even charted, it looks like his career has hit the skids seemingly overnight.
Maybe he thinks that morphing into a bad boy will keep his maturing audience interested. Maybe he’s rebelling against the wishes of his family and management (and what kid doesn’t rail against authority). Maybe he’s just totally unaware that his actions have consequences. None of that matters. What he’s managed to do is take an enormous following and make them indifferent at best and disgusted at worst. Before too long, he’ll be a has-been trying to make a buck playing the oldies club circuit.
And that’s the cautionary tale here. Fans are hard to come by. They, of course, have to love your music first and foremost, but they also have to identify with you in some way, which is one of the basic pillars of branding. You or your actions (or both) also have to be likeable, which few of his once legion of fans find these days. Once you’ve broken your brand, it’s a huge uphill battle to build it back up, as Bieber will soon find out.
But how is Miley Cyrus any different from Beiber, you ask? Miley’s actions have been cold and calculated, done on-stage for the greatest promotional bang-for-the-buck to get her fans to think of her in a new way and forget her past. Mission accomplished. Bieber’s exploits have no marketing rhyme nor reason, just some kid with too much money playing out his fantasies before the public’s prying eyes. He’s in the news now not because of his sales or YouTube views or concert attendance, but because he’s now such a train-wreck that TMZ has an army of cameras focused on his every move.
If you look back to the beginning, Justin Bieber was pretty much an overnight success, going from busking in his hometown of Stratford Canada to selling out stadiums in a mere nine months, thanks in part to a cell phone video posted on YouTube that got the ball rolling. Unfortunately, careers that are in for the long haul are built over the long haul, one gig and one fan at a time. Instant success usually means a fall from the public eye that’s nearly as fast.
It’s not uncommon to see teen stars fade into obscurity at the end of a short run. This usually happens naturally as the audience ages and literally grows out of the fad. What’s so unusual here is to have a teen star go so far out of his way to damage his career that he lops off a few years in the process.
Too bad, Justin. You could have had it all (to paraphrase Adel) for at least a little while longer, but you blew it.
