Spice Girls - Creating a Brand

The following post will analyse how pop groups can be used to create brands. Examples of where this has been done before are Adele, Lady Gaga and The Spice Girls.

Pop videos help to:

Advertise
Illustrate the song
Appeal to a visual audience
Express an individuals emotions
Markets an image
Create a brand 


In the mid 1990's, a family management team set out to forge a girl group to compete with all the popular boy bands that dominated the pop music scene.

In February 1994 a magazine ad, by heart management was placed in ''the stage'' trade magazine.  The ad read ''R.U 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance, R.U streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated?'' this was the beginning of the creation of this new star girl group.

The clothes of the spice girls were all very carefully chosen. To the audience though it may look like they're just wearing whatever they wanted to wear and that very little thought went into it at all. 

Despite the fact that the spice girls were sold as just a group of friends messing around without any formal structure, creating music, they were actually a carefully chosen group of individuals, selected after hundreds of auditions. 

Once the Spice Girls brand had began gaining popularity, they had loads of sponsorship deals including Pepsi, Polaroid and even Spice Girl Barbie Dolls. 

It is important to note though that most of the things about the Spice Girls were controlled by their managers behind the scenes in corporations. 

One of the Spice Girls almost did not make it into the group because she looked a lot older than the others. When asked about her age she said ''I'm as old as you want me to be, ill be ten with big boobs if you want'' 

Artists and groups are often sold as a brand. Music and videos are presented as products of the brand and their main purpose is to encourage people to buy into the brand. Some artists tend to focus more on their image than the quality of the product that they produce. The Spice Girls are an example of this. At other times, the artists image has very little to do with the music they produce.