Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber were both “cute” teenage performers that appealed to a wide audience of tweens and their parents.
Parents saw them as great role models for their kids since they both looked squeaky clean and appeared to espouse the family values so many parents want their kids to follow.
With some luck and help from entertainment industry powers, Miley and Justin quickly grew into teen stars that made a lot of money.
Miley Cyrus is estimated to have a net worth between $120 and $150 million whereas Justin Bieber’s net worth is pegged at around $130 million.
Benefitting from the Disney marketing machine, Cyrus was Disney TV character Hannah Montana, a regular singer on the Disney channel, a concert performer that recorded albums, and the namesake of the a clothing line launched by Disney in 2007.
She filled the shoes of Hillary Duff, who portrayed the role of Lizzie McGuire and graduated from the Disney “School of Synergy” as did Britney Spears and many others child stars that came before dating back to the Mickey Mouse Club of the 1950’s.
Similar to her predecessors, as Miley moved past her tween years, so did her fans. What worked for the Hannah Montana crowd is not going to work for 20 somethings. The target audience, or lock, has has changed so Miley needed to come up with a new edgier image, or key, to remain relevant.
Starting with new hairdos, Bieber and Cyrus are indeed deliberately crafting edgier images to meet the evolving needs of their target audiences.
Miley Cyrus (sporting her own tattoos) has caused quite a stir with her twerking performance at the VMA Awards and her naked ride on a wrecking ball in her Wrecking Ball video, which has over 231 million page views on YouTube.
While some parents from her Hannah Montana days are outraged, she has gotten a lot of attention, is selling lots of records, and laughing all the way to the bank. Like it or not, her audience is older and they seem to want what she is giving them.
Let’s face it… neither of them can ever go back to being cute 15 and 16 year olds again. The best they can do is go after an older, edgier audience and keep their PR machines going.
Their behavior, while criticized by more than a few, is part of a deliberate market plan to shatter their goody two shoes images and create new ones that fit the desires of their changing audiences. They need new keys for evolving locks, and that is what they are creating.
If you judge them by the numbers — followers on social media, brisk record sales, and sold out tours, their rebranding plans are working really well.
