 What's up everybody, once again, it's Brand Man Sean and this video is brought to you by brandmannetwork.com because I signed myself. Now, I got to talk about Megan V. Stallion. Now, if you remember, I called it that Megan Stallion was going to blow up. I mean, good minute before she actually did, but what I want to do in this particular post is I got to show appreciation for the marketing and branding that's happening around Megan V. Stallion. Now, if you're a dude, I know there's a lot of dudes out there who are like, yo, like I can't really learn from watching girl situations. They really have to watch people that look exactly like them. That's mostly a problem, but I might even get into that. But I want to make sure that everybody knows like, nah, bro, everybody can learn from their campaign. And before I get into breaking down, some of the things that happen in their campaign that just really reflect the amazing job that her and her team did, right? I got to specify and make clear the difference between a situation like hers and somebody like a Cardi B in more recent years. Now, when we look at a Cardi B and even a Lil Nas X similar situations, Cardi B had Bodak Yellow, right? A huge hit like Lil Nas X obviously on a lower level because that was just completely historic. And when you have that huge hit and that specific song takes off, right? Then there's a different way and a different approach that's necessary to blow things up than it is in a situation like Megan Thee Stallion where she didn't have one song that really carry and took over in that specific way. And another thing with their particular situation is Cardi B, her main thing was personality, her, her, her, her. And that whole thing that she had built up on social media. This takes nothing from her and her team, by the way, but that's a different situation than Megan Thee Stallion. You'll see why I'm breaking it down in this particular way. When you have a song that takes off with that magnitude and you already have this infectious, you know, personality, that's where everything is focused on. And it should be, right? That's the smart team will do it that way. But the Megan Thee Stallion route is actually something that's far more repeatable and far more comprehensive for a team that wants to figure out how can I do this, right? Because when you look at their particular situation, there wasn't one huge, huge hit, right? Of course she has her biggest song and if you're in the culture, her songs might seem like they were everywhere, but it didn't hit the Bodag Yellow route and it definitely didn't hit the Lil Nas X Old Town Road route, obviously. So what happened was a consistent push that happened over time with multiple songs, right? And then there's this constant branding that's going back and forth. What do I mean by that? Let's hop into the screen share. All right, so one example is our Hotty Cam. I don't have a visual to show at this moment because she was actually doing this as early as last year and I think she actually stopped doing it at this point. But imagine just the fact that you know that a lot of people share people who mentioned them on Instagram. Instead of just sharing people mentioning her on Instagram on their stories or just sharing people twerking to her songs and things like that, she actually had it branded where it was called the Hotty Cam. And doing something like that, right, is something that multiple people do without the name. But once you add a name to it, you own it and now it's cemented the thought in people's heads. So people wouldn't just say, oh my gosh, Megan shared my picture or she shared my twerking or whatever. They'll be like, I was on the Hotty Cam. I made it to the Hotty Cam. It creates a movement and a groundswell and just another sub-brand around yourself. So that right there is just a great example of how you have normal things, but when people own them and brand around it, it becomes even more powerful and that's something that she was doing early on. Another thing, of course, many of you might have seen, we covered the fact that she did sex talk, which was one of her songs, but since it was talking sex, right, she played off of that theme and used a superphone functionality where people call in and when people called in, they could hear a snippet of the song. So there's a great way to find out who are those people who are engaged with you. It's a cool thing, right, anyway, right. I'm a fan or I might not even be a fan, but I just think it's cool. I'm gonna call this number and see what I hear and I am interested to hear the snippet of the song to hear earlier, even if I wasn't super curious, just because she did it this way, I might want to check it out. And once I do this, now you have people's phone numbers and having that access allows you to target people, engage people in a whole another way, right. So creating a cool activation where contextually it was not only dope, but a way to get more engaged with your fans and capture information for them is a beautiful thing. And whoever came up with that for her team did a great job for that. And then once again, you add the Hottie Ranch, where it's actually funny because I thought it would be a lot more footage when it comes to the Hottie Ranch, but I actually couldn't find much for it. But she had an event, right, a release party for Fever. And for this release party, she played off two major themes, one, the whole Hottie thing because that's her brand. She had been doing it for a good minute even before she blew up and her being from Texas. So why not do a Hottie Ranch and play off of the whole Cowgirl Cowboy Western theme, which is exactly what she did. She pulled up to the Hottie Ranch on a horse, right? How hard is that? And how dope does that play off of that theme? The entire night felt like an old school saloon. I'll just flash a few highlights on the screen. You can check that out. But it's another activation of creating that world and creating this whole groundswell and buzz around being a Hottie, but doing it in an interesting way every single time, right. She creates an environment where it's cool to be this Hottie thing. It's interesting. And it also continues to push Megan to the forefront, which brings me back to Megan in general. She has just some cool things that she does herself that help her with marketing the brand, even if she's not doing it on purpose, right? And it's just kind of like who she is and thinks is cool. She talks about how her alter egos are basically personalities and she's serious with it. She pushes these things constantly and she does it in a way that's pretty organic. A quote from an article says that in a conversation with Complex and South by Southwest, she said, my alter egos are basically personalities. I go through on a day-to-day basis. Megan Thee Stallion is the sexy rapper we usually see on stage at concerts. Then you have Tina Snow, which categorizes as a confident pimp. Tina Snow was inspired by Pimp C's alias Tony Snow. Next is Hot Girl Meg, who is like the party girl, the college girl. She likes to turn up. And finally, there is Meg, the school girl who is respectful to her parents. All of these are interesting different personalities that a lot of people can actually choose to see themselves in, right? In the same way we see cast of characters and these characters in a movie, I might relate to one versus another. I might be this person's friend, but I'm not that person. I'm the other guy, right? It's the same thing with her. She's creating versions of herself for people to relate to or even to be in any given moment. I'm not Hot Girl Meg right now. I'm Tina Snow. I'm not Tina Snow right now. I'm Meg, the school girl. Whichever one of those things that people decide to be, just creates another connection point for people. And the even cooler thing as we talked about Meg, the school girl, is just the way that she's constantly marketing and integrated her being in college into her brand. It's something that's been important to her. And she was actually like at Prairie View, I believe, and then moved up to UT, another school in Texas. I think I got those right. But with that being said, she didn't have to actually make that a part of her brand. Especially in hip hop, sometimes how they make school or being that type of person, right? Not cool. Especially when your brand is her type of brand, right? Her brand isn't really a full on nerdy or I'm an over intellectual brand or anything like that. But she uses it to her advantage a lot more than somebody like Saweetie who also came out of college. And that was an earlier part of her brand where she mentioned it a little bit and she graduated and all that kind of stuff. But I guess her graduating, it's time to move on. She can't hold on to that. But Megan actually is still in college and made it really clear. And the back and forth and balance and all that stuff has been something that she showed people as she gone throughout that process of her life. And it just created another connection point, which will bring me to something else later. But of course we can't mention in the marketing that Megan has without talking about Hot Girl Summer. Now the power of Hot Girl Summer goes beyond the fact that she's a rapper and she's pushing this theme or she said it and a lot of people caught on to it. Hot Girl Summer is something that's easily relatable for a lot of people. Hot Girl already existed, right? Hot Girl goes back to Missy Elliott doing that song with, I can't even remember who it was right now. Oh actually it was Eve. But that was a huge song back then and just the whole term Hot Girl, just like Hot Boy already existed, right? It's already a familiarity for the term in the market. It's easy, it rolls off the tongue. You don't have to think too much about it and even try to interpret it. And everything about it already reinforces what Hot Girl sounds like but then also what everything that people would want it to be. There's other phrases that don't do that as much even like City Girl Summer. City Girl could easily just mean a girl from the city. Like it's other terms that could be a little bit more confusing that makes it harder to just get and catch on as quickly. So whenever you have a phrase that's easy to understand in positive ways what it means, but it's also applicable to multiple things, it's going to help that phrase spread because it's natural in language. Being natural in language is extremely important when we talk about these types of phrases that catch on. We know hot means it's hot outside. We know hot means you look good. We know hot means like the block is hot, gotta move. There's already all these applications to it. We just gotta slide in and start allowing people to know that it's a thing to use again. Then of course we already know what the summertime does. But a really cool thing that Megan has really been doing that's even more interesting is how they've transitioned and talked about after Hot Girl Summer because it seems like she's been testing different things. I've heard iteration from Hot Girl Fall after Hot Girl Summer which in my opinion could seem like it's pushing it because you know you gotta stop eventually. And then she's also mentioned Hot Nerd Fall which again that one is a little bit forced and it's just not as catchy, it's not as clean and doesn't apply to as many people. You already have the Meg the school girl personality for that but then she said Hot Girl semester. Hot Girl semester. Now that one to me actually plays very well because it already plays back into the college team. It does cut off some of her audience who might not be in college but it flows, it rolls off the tongue and then it does integrate with her life and allows those college students that follow her that relate to her to be able to have something to continue to relate with. But no matter what she chooses and whether it lasts or not is the fact that she's saying multiple things. That's the thing to really know. And interestingly enough, Donald Trump actually does this quite a bit where you're in the public eye and you're saying a lot of phrases and some people might say one thing sounds bad, they might not like it or they might not notice it at all but the point is you say these things and you see which thing catches on and then you double down and own that thing that catches on. So let's just say Hot Girl fall does catch off over Hot Girl semester and Hot Nerd fall, right? Because the internet just takes it on with the life of its own. In that case, she'll probably double down on that. Or maybe she's not doing that on purpose and testing it. Either way it goes, that's how it plays out. And we already see how powerful Hot Girl summer is to the extent that Megan and Stallion trademarked it. And the crazy part about it is she actually wanted to trademark because sometimes when you use words, you know, that's simple in that comment that really is hard to get to trademark. It's dope that she was able to get it but this just continues on a long streak of just constant marketing and dope branding moves that have stuck together whether it's the stuff with her team, the stuff that also has Spotify involved when we look at the Hotty Ranch because Spotify really does some both campaigns like they did with Two Chains and the Pink Trap House. There's so many moments in Megan and Stallion's rise that you can really look at and say, no, they're not just riding the wave of a huge song. They're pushing constantly. They're using moves to kind of double down and even doing songs like Hot Girl Summer, right? Continuing the wave and continuing to sustain but build up at the same time. We're gonna push these songs and we're gonna keep getting another song and another song because she's had multiple songs this year that had their own individual wave as opposed to one song that had one big wave and then she's had multiple branding moments and it's constantly happening. And then we gotta give it up to Megan and Stallion just in general because it's been a minute since I've seen somebody just look like they went through true artist development. Now I've seen the fact that she's been grinding for a minute, obviously I called her out before she actually blew up and all that good stuff but when you see her carry herself out in interviews the way she handles herself in interviews seems like she's been an artist for a minute, right? The kind of conversations and because of her content of her music some of the questions that people would ask her and things that they would talk to her about and the way she handles those even the way she handled the Trey Song situation when he tweeted at her has all been highly professional even her stage presence. It's all like I've been doing this for a minute. I was built for this. It's a really interesting thing about her. I'm interested to see how things play out over time and I would love to hear how the team that they have looks at marketing and how they look at things like artist development. Is it a true artist development thing going on or is she just that dope and she's kind of been running herself through that? But it all shows and it's the perfect marriage of so, so, so, so many different variables. Not to mention her manager Carl, right? Ex baseball player had the money to even find and fund a type of artist. But the fact that that grind is a grind in itself. You need team, right? That's why I've made a big point in this video continuously mentioning team and not just Megan Eastallian, especially Operation Rain this well. You need team from the marketing standpoint. You need team from a management standpoint. You need an artist and a talent like this. This story isn't a once in a lifetime or once in a generation or even once every five years necessarily. It's a story where you catch a big hit or just something takes off because of certain factors and variables. It truly is. So many things done. Well done. Control variables as a full operation with all those different aspects in line and just running as a well oil machine. Of course, everything is in always. Easy and greasy in the background, but at the end of the day, right? What you see in the results. They're killing it this year. So hopefully y'all are able to understand that and able to just watch what she does cause she's a real case study and look at her a lot deeper than just the music and how people consider her type of content. But other than that, as you always know, this video is brought to you by brandman.org.com because I signed myself. We help artists build their brands, develop their fan base and mentor them throughout the process. If you liked this video, go ahead and like button. If you like it, might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.