Strategic Management

Assignment I

Case Study: Individual Assignment

Submitted to:

Mr. Sohan Babu Khatri

Submitted by:

Pritisma Satyal

Section: A

MBAe, Trimester VIII

Ace Institute of Management

Date:28th September, 2019

The music industry is full of one-hit wonders and brief careers. Pop stars that remain at the
top for decades are very few; and even fewer can claim to be one of the wealthiest women
in the world, running a highly successful business. Madonna’s story is an example of
sustained competitive success. She was once described by Billboard magazine as “the
smartest businesswoman in show business”. It is not hard to find the reason why she is the
highest ever paid female singer with 30 years of success at the top and she deserves that
accolade. She is known for her continuous invention as a singer and a performer. Decades
of success requires determination, the ability to recognize change and need to have a long
term plan.

Differentiation strategy is a strategy that provides product or services that offer benefits
that are different from those of competitors and that are highly valued by the customers.
She follows the differentiation strategy by identifying and understanding the choices of
target customers. She identifies identify key trends in music, style, and popular culture.
Madonna identifies and understand the target groups well, such as target at young
“wannabe” girl by poppy style and also, she was using Marilyn image to achieve a new
group of fans. She also targets a different group of people such as children, mother and
also the gay-icon audience. She uses a diversification strategy to widen her business. Apart
from her singles and albums, she also achieved success in her sell-out world tours, major
roles in six films, picked up eighteen music awards. She has promoted top brands like
Pepsi, Max Factor, GAP, H&M, and Louise Vuitton. Besides that, she also became a
bestselling children’s author for The English Roses and Mr. Peabody’s Apples. It has also
allowed her to attain a highly consistent image across her different media ventures.
Diversification has elevated Madonna from a simple popular singer and actor to a superstar.
This has given Madonna a huge advantage in any field of endeavor she enters.

The success story of Madonna is to be based on her innovative ideas. For instance, in
January 1989, she wrote a song called “Like a Prayer”. The song is about her personal life
such as divorce, the death of her mother, her father, and the family about the pain of dying.
Madonna signed a contract with Pepsi. In the Pepsi commercials, she debuted her song
“Like a Prayer.” Although the music video was creative, it represented issues of religious
belief. Madonna has been considered as one of the most successful musician icons in the
recent past. This has been evidenced by the successful music career, she has been able to
launch. Madonna’s struggle for fame revealed a drive and determination for hard work that
would characterize her whole career. Not only one there are several reasons behind her
sustained success over the past two decades.

Madonna had great skills to adapt to the new and challenging world, a most important
attribute, and a laudable quality to possess in a world that is changing. Her desire to remain
at the top and her sustained level of effort to evolve and reinvent herself as new stars
entering the music world. She continuously changed her music genre to attract different
music lovers. The poppy style that attracted young girls was replaced by the darker more
intense sexuality involving themes of sadomasochism and bisexuality.

Madonna knew that becoming a successful entrepreneur was all about linking with the right
people to achieve her end objectives. Collaborating with the right kind of people meant
that she could be able to get the necessary information that she needed. She worked with
her boyfriend at the beginning of her career in writing and performing songs. Similarly,
her swift exit from her marriage with Sean Penn, her high profile lover Warren Beatty who
became a vehicle for her career and her marriage to British actor/director Guy Ritchie. She
managed all these alliances to achieve her specific goals.

Madonna competes in multiple markets. These include recorded music, music videos,
concerts, televised appearances, movies, books and music, and video production,
publishing, and promotion. This has widened her business across multiple media including
record releases, concert tours, and videos. She also published her children’s fiction in the
summer of 2003. “The English Roses” book was based on the themes of compassion and
friendship which became an immediate best-seller.

Madonna was ruling the entertainment industry due to her maximum use of controversy to
maintain in media and public interest. Her fame in the early 1990s, when she became one
of the first world’s mass-market performers to manipulate the proximity of sexual and
religious themes in her song “Like a Prayer”. The song was Madonna’s chart-topping song
and its video featured many Catholic symbols. She continuously tried to comeback in
limelight. She wrote erotic book, released video of “Justify my love” which was banned by
MTV as it portrayed homosexuality, snogging Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera,
lesbian scenes in Britney’s video, an advocate of Kabbalah, involvement in social and
philanthropic activities for raising Malawi foundation which helped her to always be
present in the media.

Not only has Madonna been criticized in her acting role but also when she released her
2003 album, American Life, she encountered stiff criticism. Some described the album as
an indication that she needed a vacation from the stress of her career. In spite of all these
criticisms and setbacks; Madonna has been able to reincarnate her career repeatedly. For
instance, following the commercial flop of American Life, Madonna embarked on her “re-
invention world tour” in 2004 during which she played 56 dates around the world.

Madonna sustained her career for many decades due to her chameleon-like ability to
change persona and change her music genre with it. One main advantage for her career has
been the fact that she is benefited by first-mover position and becoming the game-changer.
But through imitation, repositioning of strategies, blocking first-mover advantage and other
various barrios, competitors may threaten the sustainability of Madonna’s success. They
may seek to enter new markets to imitate such as high take method of recording/ producing
albums. Other competitors may also adopt other strategies which are not adopted by
Madonna such as low price strategy to attract her fans and followers.

Now days too many new talent or star came out in entertainment industry and it will give
bad impact to Madonna because most of the new generation likes to watch and give their
support to new artists compare than the oldies. Most of the new artist now has a new talent
that we can’t see from the previous evergreen generation. So that Madonna should work
harder to make sure her reputation will not go down and can become a diva forever.
According to the poll of young Americans, they are highly distrustful of Madonna, who is
17 times less influential than Taylor Swift and 15 times less influential than Adele.
Madonna gets too much criticism along with her career because of controversy and her
tricks to promote her new songs. These controversies and criticism might also affect the
success of Madonna. Many people who give the critic to her will feel that Madonna is the
wrong icon for them because don’t know how to care her fans sensitivity. Most of her story
in a magazine or from paparazzi is about her sex appeal is too much. Her continued efforts
to remain sexually appealing were described as desperate and inauthentic. According to the
survey, three in five said her image was “embarrassing”. So, she may be famous for other
reason than a singer or a movie star.

Therefore, one of Madonna's greatest achievements is how she manipulated the media and
the public with her music, her videos, her publicity, and her sexuality. Arguably, Madonna
was the first female pop star to have complete control of her music and image. Madonna
named also list as one of People Magazine's '50 Most Beautiful People of 1991', and '25
Most Intriguing People of 2001'. It is because Madonna has her Image, music genre and
targeted audiences for each album that been produced in the market. She is ranked by the
Recording Industry Association of America as the best-selling female rock artist of the
twentieth century and the second top-selling female artist in the United States with 63
million certified albums. Guinness World Records list her as the world's most successful
female recording artist of all time and the top-earning female singer in the world with an
estimated net worth of over US$400 million, having sold over 200 million records
worldwide.