With the weather being a bit rubbish this summer I’ve spent less time in beer gardens and more time on my phone. A place where it’s been hard to avoid Charli XCX’s latest album, brat.
Now I must say she’s not really my cup of tea musically but with social media spiralling into some sort of hype tornado over the past few weeks I thought I’d see what the fuss is about. The album has garnered significant attention and acclaim since its release 10 days ago. brat has achieved remarkable critical success, receiving a score of 95 on Metacritic, making it the highest-rated album of 2024 so far. Reviews often reference its hedonistic and chaotic energy, with The Independent and The Guardian both awarding it high ratings for its ‘expansive vision’ and ‘emotional depth.’
Across social media brat’s footprint has transcended it’s original medium and spread like wildfire with the launch posts on both X and Instagram driving record engagements and over 50,000 comments. With TikTok following suit, the hashtag #BratChallenge, associated with the album, has accumulated over 100 million views. Charli’s own TikTok account, with over 2 million followers, has seen videos related to the album gain millions of views and again, record engagement rates.
Now I know what you’re thinking … this isn’t a music blog, Rabbit Comms isn’t a record label (yet.) So what lessons can ad land learn from brat? And what factors other than catchy tunes have contributed to its reach and success? Let’s take a look…
Bottle brand essence
Brat is a masterclass in why branding matters in a visual-first world. It all starts with a visual look and feel that matches the content. The brat playbook is characterised by an off-trend lime green that really sticks out in an era dominated by primary colours. Low-res Arial narrow font in lowercase, over imposed and poorly scaled, adds to this ownable and distinctive ID. It’s jarring, it doesn’t appeal visually – it’s essentially a confrontational statement masquerading as album artwork. But what it does do is both perfectly capture the essence of the album, and act as an incredibly simple visual identity for fans to engage with
Help fans participate and they will
Now we’ve spoken about the power of simplicity in our article on FMCG last month and brat is a masterclass in pulling off this strategy. The colour provides a replicable rally point for fans to participate easily with the most basic of social media tools. Suddenly anything vaguely the same colour can be potential brat content making satirising the phenomena easy, further driving participation and engagement. For the slightly trickier elements like the typeface, the team created bratgenerator.com to instantly build brat-style messaging for use in everything from social media posts and merch to article titles on Rabbit comms blogs to drive home the point that the brat team have essentially created an open source brand toolkit.
Consistency is key
The team then follow this vein and consistently apply the branding to every touchpoint available from the vinyl, to the stage design, even going as far to retrospectively updating all the old Charli CXC album covers bringing them inline with the current brat branding.
Here the team are masterfully using ‘mimetics’ – a behavioural concept that highlights the fact that the more something is mimicked, the more ‘mimickable’ it becomes. So when we see the artist participating in the viral campaign in real life below with a generated message, the team are engineering shareable moments to lay the foundations for further participation angles like the example on the right. Smart stuff hey
The result is a state that all of us as marketers strive for. The ad land golden goose – the self sustaining viral campaign. Let’s recap how we got here. Firstly they’ve created a cut through brand that bottles the brand essence in a simple way. They’ve deployed this simplicity with open source visual tools to facilitate easy-to-achieve fan participation. And lastly they’ve consistently applied this branding to create genuine momentum through engineered and shareable moments. For more branding insights contact the Rabbit Comms team on info@wearerabbits.co.uk
