What you should know about BRAT

That lime green colour. That blurry font. And now BRAT has been picked up by the Kamala Harris campaign (this is August 2024).

Is this something worth finding more about or will it all blow over by the autumn, like Gangnam Style and Barbie did? Almost certainly yes. But, it is intriguing and is, I believe, worthy of analysis.

If nothing else, you can outwit your nephew and niece - or your sceptical mother and father - by sounding incredibly well-informed on the subject. You are, as ever, most welcome.

One of the topics on CharliXCX's Brat album is insecurity. I've put together a Spotify playlist on this very topic for you: 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6y1jMp1i61h4MgF5M7vQWs?si=1de421fcef08489c

Be expertly briefed each week on a wide variety of intriguing musical topics.

Chapters

• 0:19 Introduction
• 1:13 The Medium Sized Dive
• 2:47 Three Macro Factors
• 4:12 A Traditional Campaign
• 7:26 Targeting broadly
• 9:18 Distinctive assets and campaign discipline
• 11:22 Authenticity
• 13:51 Kamala Harris and Built-In Best Before Date
• 15:16 Conclusion

Transcript

Introduction

I’m not going to explain what a Brat summer is for you, because if I have to do that then you’re part of the reason I’ve been pushed to write this in the first place. The people who Brat summer is for already knew what it was when Charli XCX dropped the album, and aren’t the reason for why it’s now ruined and in tatters. 

 Not my words, but those of Harrison Brocklehurst on thetab.com. His Brat Summer has been ruined because it’s now mainstream. I get it. I felt the same way when sports crowds started singing versions of Love Will Tear Us Apart. Et cetera.

 However, I’m not going to be deterred from joining the stampede of people with content to generate intent on culturally analysing Brat. Let’s take that medium-sized dive.

The Medium-Sized Dive

 English singer-songwriter Charli XCX released her album "Brat" on June 7, featuring hits such as "Von Dutch" and "360." The album embraces a hot-mess pop star aesthetic, prioritizing club culture at its core but still offering introspective lyrics on aging, womanhood, grief and anxiety.

 What defines Brat, or Brat Summer, as a cultural phenomenon rather than merely an album?  At its core, simply having fun and being a little messy. On top of that, some items have been brat-coded. Dirty martinis, cigarettes, Red Bulls, white tank tops but also salads.

 Charli herself has broken down the meaning of brat as: “You’re that girl who is a bit messy and loves to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes. She’s honest, blunt, and a little bit volatile. That’s Brat.”

 You might think – huh, that’s it? And in a way, you’d be right. On the surface it hardly feels revolutionary or especially meaningful. So this is one of the shallowest of our medium-sized dives. Almost off the lower board, so to speak. BUT, as we probe Brat, a surprising number of themes come bubbling up.

 Let’s have the entirely reasonable discussion.

Reasonable Discussion

The Three Macro Factors

Three factors need to be taken into account when assessing why Brat has become a worldwide viral sensation.

The first is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It can be seen as a riposte to cultural movements of the recent past - clean living, the perfection of Taylor Swift, the aloofness of Beyonce, the earnestness of the MeToo era, to take a few examples.

The second is that this didn’t just happen. It was meticulously planned over the course of a year in granular detail, almost like, yes, a political campaign. It also demonstrated all the discipline of the best-run political campaigns. We’ll go on to investigate how this has been achieved.

Then third, serendipity. All the planning in the world couldn’t have predicted Kamala Harris’s campaign would adopt some of the Brat tropes. No one even knew she’d be a presidential candidate when it was released.

Now, one theme I’d like to pick out which underscores all the others is that BRAT is in many ways, but not all, a very traditional campaign.

So, let’s make that the second point. Traditional techniques.

A traditional campaign

In support of this album, CharliXCX did the following. A lot of press interviews. Buses with the album on the cover. Theatre movie showcases. A music video for the single with friends and stars. Album signing and meeting fans in person plus photo opportunities. Singing on the top of a car in public while surrounded by a mass of fans (also filmed). Club appearances.

The truth is she could have done any of this activity 50 years ago as none of it relies on social media or new platforms particularly. Despite being a millennial, she didn’t eschew more traditional techniques and platforms. Nor did she stint on getting a team together and organising the rollout a year before it culminated. At the risk of sounding like a parent or a teacher, she put in the effort and she reaped the rewards. What she didn’t do is just drop the album out of nowhere. Which you can do - and if you’re one of a handful of artists in the world, that can work for you. 

However, listen to the words of thepianonerd4960 on Youtube: Yeah I just got to the party just now too. How the hell did she totally fly under my radar for so long? She’s incredible. Sad to not be an OG fan, looking forward to going back through the rest of her discography. 

CharliXCX no doubt reasoned she wasn’t one of those artists who can drop an album from nowhere and wait for the world to come to you. She had flown on the cusp of the radar – if that’s possible - for 15 years at least and, while popular and successful, was kind of underground as well. Since we’re in the realm of marketing, I’d refer you to a campaign for Avis from the 1960s. All they had going for them was that they were the second car hire company after Hertz which seemed highly unpromising. But the line they landed on was We Try Harder. CharliXCX has done the same thing here and turned a necessity into a virtue. She tried harder.

It certainly wasn’t all traditional marketing, of course. There were other components such as a brat burner account, partygirl with boiler roombrat, the brat wall in New York and also a brat generator and memes. One thing I will say about the brat generator is that I used it without any problem at all. You could too. The fact that you didn’t have to jump through hoops or have any crazy tech know-how meant that even boomers could generate their brat memes and get in on the party. Which, for better or worse, they do.

So, a traditional campaign. Which leads neatly into the next point …

It Targeted Everyone

How to maximise sales has long been a contentious topic in marketing. It wasn’t that long ago that the orthodoxy was to position your product or brand to reach a highly segmented audience. There was a sort of commonsensical logic to this – why waste limited marketing dollars talking to 20-year-olds about a car they couldn’t afford?

All of that was turned on its head by the book How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. Without going into all his supporting arguments, Sharp proved beyond reasonable doubt that it was in fact more effective to reach as many people as possible rather than restrict yourself to a niche. 

By reaching into the general population she can sweep up all the pockets who actually quite like the music and realise you can play it in the car after a difficult day at work, not as they’d previously thought, that this was music for Gen Z clubbers. More importantly, she can become a cultural phenomenon and by over investing now, every subsequent release will become an event. She will amortise her investment over time, so to speak. 

Sure, not everyone is going to be on the beach in Barcelona for a 1pm pop-up DJ set before Primavera. But no one could escape the lime green everywhere all the time, not even your mum. In the screenshot for the 360 video there are children and parents as well as the standard influencers to make the point.

So, it talks to everyone, just not niches. Next let’s talk distincetive assets and campaign discipline.

Distinctive assets and discipline

The trouble is no one cares about your brand. Really there’s no such thing as brand loyalty with the very occasional exception such as your football team. Instead people rely on short cuts or heuristics, if you prefer. These have come to be known as distinctive assets.

For example, Tiffany don’t sell better or worse jewellery especially than anyone else. Cadbury chocolate is, honestly, pretty average stuff. But if I say Tiffany, what first comes into your head? The logo and that tealish blue perhaps. Same deal with Cadbury – the logo and the purple. And, sad to say, these assets mean they sell loads more than better products.

Ripple dissolve to the Brat campaign and what have we got? Why a colour and a highly distinctive blurry font. This is perhaps the best coordinated deployment of distinctive assets we’ve ever witnessed in a campaign to sell an album.

Now you might say it’s a great album and people would have listened to it anyway. Some people would have. But no one has limitless time. Again, in marketing-speak, this is what’s known as physical and mental availability. Both are a problem for the artist because everyday 100,000 new songs are released onto streaming platforms. 

Relentless deployment of distinctive assets and military discipline have both characterised the supposedly messy campaign, which in reality has been anything but. 

Now, let’s talk about autheniticity.

Authenticity

I actually think that the special pleas for the New Authenticity in Brat, refreshing as it might be and a big reason for the album’s success, is just that – refreshing - but in no sense novel.

In oh so many ways
My independence seems to vanish in the haze
But every now and then 

I feel so insecure 

In 1964 the Fame juggernaut had caught up with John Lennon. Just two years into Beatlemania he was struggling to cope. He’d put on a lot of weight. He wrote Helpwhich on the face of it is another pop hit. But it genuinely was a call for help. The Beatles showed that you could combine commercial success with vulnerability and authenticity.

Which is another way of leading into the comment that Charli XCX has pulled off another traditional trick from 60 years ago on this album. 

And I'm so scared I'm missin' out on something
So, we had a conversation on the way home
Should I stop my birth control?
'Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all

I think about it all the time

That is from I think about it all the time and there’s plenty more in the vulnerability arena where that came from on the album. If you haven’t listened to it yet and think it’s full of club bangers and lacks depth or nuance, you’re only half right. Much like Help, yes, it’s a pop album. But it is authentic. At least we assume it’s authentic and you’d have to be pretty cynical to conclude otherwise.

You could argue that authenticity is a zeitgeist thing to tap into as we move out of the era where everybody had to be painfully conscious of not saying the wrong thing. Maybe. But she certainly wears it well as another old-timer put it.

Two Last Points

Two other quick points to finish. As if to underscore how traditional in some ways the whole Brat phenomenon is, it has, as you almost certainly know, been picked up by Kamala Harris as a campaign theme. Well, I say that, but more accurately it’s been picked up by her team. She has not personally associated herself with it, I think wisely. Brat’s edgy enough that a politician standing for president wants to lean into it to distance herself from an ageing political opponent. But not so edgy that people will be put off.

The final clever thing is that Brat arrives with its own built in ‘Best Before Date’. The sub-branding, so to speak is Brat Summer. Everyone knows these things come and they go. We won’t be talking about Brat in the Autumn. The fact I’m doing this podcast already acknowledges that the moment has effectively past. But that’s fine, same as it ever was.

So, there we have Brat. Let’s try to sum all that up.