Monster Loyalty: What Lady Gaga can teach businesses

Recently, I read Jackie Huba’s “Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics” published by Penguin Group earlier this year. Lady Gaga has experienced great success in her career and Huba connects that success not only to her raw talent, but also to her ability to create loyal fans with the community she has built around her brand. The book is as much praise for Lady Gaga’s ability to market herself as it is ideas about how you can market your business or product to create loyal customers.

Your business may not see a boost in sales and loyalty if you dress your product in meat, but that doesn’t mean businesses everywhere can’t learn something from Lady Gaga’s strategy.

One place you will certainly be able to identify with Lady Gaga: she doesn’t want to be popular now; she wants to be popular for the next 30 years. When you start your business, you want it to last for years to come. You want early success to be sustainable for at least the next 30 years.

If you want to last for years in a competitive market, you’ve probably got something to learn from Lady Gaga. Huba breaks Lady Gaga’s techniques down into seven lessons:

1. Focus on your one percenters
2. Lead with values
3. Build community
4. Give fans/customers a name
5. Embrace shared symbols
6. Make them feel like rock stars
7. Generate something to talk about

Each lesson comes with interesting examples of how Lady Gaga is doing it and practical examples of how other businesses are doing the same things. Huba takes you into the world of rock and roll while keeping you grounded and focused on how your business can use each of Gaga’s lessons.

The timing on this book is great as Lady Gaga just released a new single and is about to release her new album “ARTPOP. ” It will be interesting to watch the success of this album and see if, after a few years, Lady Gaga still has monster loyalty from her fans.

You don’t need to be in show business to benefit from what Lady Gaga can teach you about gaining a competitive edge by creating loyal customers. For a fun, easy to read, interesting look at how to create loyal customers, I recommend you pick up a copy of “Monster Loyalty.”