Every year Forbes Magazine publishes its list of the richest dead people in the world — those estates of deceased stars that are still generating mega-millions from loyalty rights to merchandising and content — and though I find it interesting from a tabloid perspective, it doesn’t cast the best light on the marketing profession. Exploiting the names and reputations of dead people is clearly a profitable venture, but it strikes me as a little seamy at times.
One of those times was the recent sale of the rights to Marilyn Monroe for $30 million to a dealmaker named Jamie Salter, who also owns the rights to Bob Marley.
R.I.P. – Retention of Income Potential
There’s big profit potential and relatively low risk in managing dead celebrity brands, as evidenced by Iconix Brand Group‘s purchase of the Peanuts brand this week for a reported $175 million. Iconix owns the rights to several notable brands like Joe Boxer underwear, but this is its first venture into character-based brands. They figure they can pump some new life into the Schulz characters and generate as much as $75 million in annual license fees.
According to Mark Roesler, CEO of CMG Worldwide — one of the largest managers of intellectual property rights and owner of several dead celebrity brands including Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain and Babe Ruth — consumer interest in famous people tends to increase even more once they’re dead. As a result, the earning potential of those brands is often far greater than when they were alive. Posthumous brands are definitely more stable and easier to manage without the scandals or career ups and downs, so there is less risk.
A recent episode with Kevin Smith and Southwest Airlines provides another glaring example illustrating that in today’s business landscape the customer rules, whether right or wrong. I’m not saying Smith is wrong, but I don’t think he was totally right either. There was a fair amount of media exploitation going on.
What he did was launch a Twitter tirade after being asked to leave a flight from Oakland to Burbank last Saturday, because his over-sized body was supposedly too large to fit in the seat and he was infringing on the space of the person next to him, as well as creating a safety threat — at least that’s how it was rationalized by the pilot and crew.
I’ve never really bought into the idea of being your own brand. If you happen to be a celebrity, it’s a logical business brand
. But for the rest of us it seems a little pretentious, like we’re packaging ourselves and creating a more marketable image and identity; for whom, our friends and coworkers at the office? I tend to think other folks don’t view us as brands, they view us as people.
The celebrity elite is another story, as personal branding is the key to success with those icons in sports and entertainment whose lives we follow on television, gossip magazines and Twitter. After all, inquiring minds want to know. Many are a flash in the pan and most are not able to sustain for any length of time. Personal brands are far more perishable than product or company brands, susceptible to the short attention span of a fickle consumer public, or to self-destruction. Even major brands like Martha Stewart can be taken down by a single incident or breach of trust. We’ll see how Tiger does now that his brand has strayed off the fairway.
