Miley Cyrus on image creation and reputation management

Hi people! :)

It`s been days...I know. Blame dissertation, flat hunting and weekend.:) I was going to share some serious stuff with you, but after this 'Miley Cyrus rocking the Internet with her VMA performance' situation I thought I should just tell you what I think...and I have like so many thoughts!:)

This morning I came across memes and articles on how this performance reached thousands of Tweets in one minute. My colleague shared with me a link with feminist perspective on what happened and a blog post on content marketing lessons to learn from this story. All of this was interesting, however, I thought of a different angle from which this Miley Cyrus thing can be used to provide some useful tips. There we go:

Reputation vs Image = Hannah Montana vs Miley Cyrus

I remember lecturers on the PR courses I attended a couple of years ago told as: image a photo - look that can be captured in one particular moment, so every person can have different images every day - hipster, punk, lady, glamorous and so on. Whilst the reputation is something consisting of many images, just like a photoalbum. Therefore, a person can be dressed differently and wear different make up, but all of this influence of the reputation in more long-term perspective. Similarly, brand and business may sell and produce various products and services, but all of this works towards the reputation they have in the eyes of the customers. Bad reputation is something that almost equals death to a business (or at least a noticeable crisis), so reputation has to be looked after.

In Miley-Cyrus-VMA-performance context, the image is something she created by producing those weird moves in her 'daring' outfit surrounded by rather creepy teddy bears or whatever it was. No, no I am not the one to judge, I am doing 'marketing approach' here, so let's just accept the whole performance and think of the message behind it. It was already written in one of the articles I referenced above, that one way to interpret this situation is as if it was meant to be 'a brave way to attract Twitter followers' and create social media buzz. In this sense, the performance was really successful. 

On the other hand, I (and assumingly a decent part of the audience) would describe that performance as a way to get rid of the lovely-cute-childish-innocent Hannah Montana character following her whatever Miley does. Well, and here is where the concepts of image and reputation come into play. Firstly, that is where all the negative comments arrive - people just do not understand what all of those moves have to do with the precious teenagers series pop star.

Secondly, You just cannot change the whole reputation by one image or in this case performance? Or..can you? Obviously you can, but only in a bad way. They say that customers and clients are not very likely to immediately express their loyalty and provide brands with trust credits, because it takes years to impress and make them fall in love with your products, but one 'bikini-sticked-out-tongue and supposed-to-be-sexy-moves' can totally ruin it for your business. I mean, it is not like you are going to shock your store visitors in this way or something, but say you decided to make a re-branding with completely different messages or started targeting a new audience, or launched a not so good product or simply argued on the phone with your frequent customer, and that is it. There is not so many ways to win the loyality back. Unfortunately...

To conclude, if Miley Cyrus wants to grow from Hannah to the more Gaga-like celebrity or follow  +badgalriri steps, one-performance image is not enough. Can`t wait to see what`s coming next. You rock it girl! :)

XoXo