How Did One Direction Market Themselves?

It has been 10 years since the formation of the biggest boy band of this decade. Many boy bands have come and gone, from The Vamps to 5 Seconds of Summer. The main question arises, what made One Direction such a big sensation?

Catchy songs and good looks aren’t enough to create an upsurge of emotional attachment of adolescent girls towards this band. If it were, competing bands during 2010 like The Wanted and Big Time Rush would’ve also made it big.

Here are the factors that owed to their success:

1. Rise of Mass Media:

In the 90s, there was concentrated power held by radio stations. Artists at the top of the charts were ‘marketing triumphs more than creative ones.’ This environment was ideal for teen boy bands like The Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync.

Cut to 2003, when iTunes produced a legal and affordable online music buying system. By 2008, radio listening had declined 14% since 1998 and iTunes accounted for 70 percent of worldwide online digital music sales.

Fast forward to 2005, YouTube surfaced as the perfect platform to house music videos online. Then came Instagram during late 2010. Social media marketing exploded on all platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

The introduction of online shopping on sites like Amazon and EBay, made purchasing all products more convenient than ever—not just music. This included merchandise of the band – 1D clothing, mugs, books and more.

2. Emotional Marketing:

Emotional Marketing gives power to a product or brand to foster customer loyalty. This style of advertising places less emphasis on what the product itself does, and more on its emotional significance for the consumer. Loyal customers purchase more and spread positive (and free!) word-of-mouth referrals, and with the popularity of social media, word-of-mouth marketing has grown at an explosive rate. This strategy was also famously implemented by legendary British boy band: the Beatles.

They also took due advantage of YouTube and social media outlets, recorded weekly video diaries to update viewers on what they were doing, how they were feeling about their performances, and to answer questions sent in by fans, during their X Factor days.

SYCO, is a British entertainment company owned by entertainment mogul, Simon Cowell, kept in mind group’s core promotional elements such as their clean style, shaggy hair, sense of humour, and their origins from a tough, working-class families. This helped the fans connect with the members on an emotional level. Besides, One Direction was accepted with open arms as there wasn’t any hit boy band since the 2000s.

3. The Adolescent Consumers (Fixed Target Audience):

They started with British girls from preadolescence to young adult and further went global, but didn’t change their target audience age. Female young-adult consumers are one of the most lucrative market segments in the music industry. Because of their youth they are easy to reach on mobile devices and social media platforms. Further, they use technology to find most of the music they consume. They are considered early adopters in music-related technology, and therefore were some of the first to use new streaming sites such as ITunes and Spotify, which, as previously discussed, generates the bulk of the music industry’s revenue.

4. Fun and Different Personas:

Following the blueprint laid out by the Beatles, One Direction used fashion and style to highlight characteristics of the band, but One Direction took individual differentiation one step further. In the beginning, each member’s clothing reflected the emphasized difference in their personality instead of wearing matching suits or sweaters like the Beatles were known for. This helped fans connect to some or all personality traits of different band members.

5. Promotional Events:

There were many but the following two were done on a global scale and stood out the most:

· Bring me to 1D:

This was a promotional event for the group’s performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City in December of 2012. To play at such a notoriously impressive venue so early in their career was impressive but obviously daunting—therefore, the group came up with a global fan contest to maximize its impact and success on the MSG stage. This contest offered the juicy prize of an all-expenses paid trip to NYC for the winners, a friend, and a guardian to see the MSG show as well as an intimate live fan event. Fans were rewarded for extensively supporting the band and were encouraged to think of the other winners as family, creating a reference group for the rest of the fandom to mimic and emulate. Thus, fan contests such as Bring Me To 1D achieve several marketing objectives while staying congruent with the narrative that One Direction was created for and by the fans.

· 1D Day:

This was a promotional event created to simultaneously thank One Direction fans for their support and promote the band’s third album, Midnight Memories.

To boost promotion and anticipation for the album, the band members hosted a 7.5 hour event dedicated to entertaining and thanking their fans. The event was live-streamed over YouTube and Google+ Hangout, and fans were encouraged to interact and participate directly through social media.

For several weeks leading up to the livestream, fans were given challenges with the winners to be announced during the stream. The challenges included photographing 1D lookalikes, writing a One Direction theme song, and making a music video.

On Twitter, the event used several hashtags that allowed fans to share content and tweet things at the band in an organized way. Say if fans used the hashtag #OnTheSpot1Ddaylive, they could have their question answered during the livestream. #1DDay was used for tweets before the event took place, and #1Ddaylive was used during the stream.

Happy 10 years to all the Directioners out there! I hope this article made you all see One Direction in a different light. Also I hope their Marketing and Events Team was paid well because such promotional events haven’t been done by any other band!

Do you remember any other marketing or PR stunt by them that stood out to you? Comment down below!