How did the idea for this research come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n My wife and I were sitting on the patio sipping margaritas, and she said to me, \u201cPlay some Jimmy Buffett.\u201d So I put on Radio Margaritaville (from SiriusXM), and we heard an ad for Latitude Margaritaville, which at the time was a new 55-plus community he was opening. They called it \u201c55 and better!\u201d And I thought that\u2019s genius because so many of the people you see at his concerts, who have been following him all these years, are now in that age group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So that struck a spark, and I started doing some research on his businesses and the escapist lifestyle he was selling. Then a few months later, Wheel of Fortune<\/em> had an entire week during which the sole prize provider was Margaritaville. And I thought, that\u2019s the hook. That was what tied it all together and made this case study important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How so?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n It made sense when you think about who the audiences are. Wheel of Fortune<\/em>\u2019s audience skews older and female, which is the same as Buffett\u2019s. It showed he understood the demographics and psychographics of his fans, many of whom are Margaritaville customers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n How important is that in business?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n There are three main academic themes that I get at in my case study. The first is the importance of knowing your unique selling point, or USP. What makes you different from everyone else who is out there? The next is brand positioning. It\u2019s a crowded marketplace, so you have to establish your ground and stay on it. The third is the importance of knowing who your customer is. I used to tell the people who worked for me that the single most important question in marketing is, who\u2019s our customer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n How does Buffett\u2019s business empire measure up in that regard?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n His Margaritaville brand is built on selling the escapist lifestyle he\u2019s been singing about for years. If you go back to his live album You Had to Be There<\/em> from 1978, he says on it, \u201cPeople ask me, where the hell is Margaritaville? And I go, \u2018It\u2019s anywhere you want it to be.\u2019\u201d That\u2019s the point. Margaritaville is not a place; it\u2019s a state of mind. And once you get this, you realize it\u2019s a place that you want to be at\u2014an escape and getaway from our everyday lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now he\u2019d been playing concerts forever and had developed this really tight-knit following\u2014the Parrotheads. Over time, the demographics of his audience evolved. It was no longer people sitting on the beach listening to him. It was professionals\u2014 people with tough jobs and, sometimes, tough family lives too\u2014looking for that two-hour-plus escape. You\u2019d see it in the parking lots before concerts where people wore tropical-themed shirts and had inflatable shark hats and wading pools. That wasn\u2019t stuff Buffett was selling; people were buying it to go to his concerts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So this concept of escape grew and became bigger than the music itself. Buffett has a good business mind. He saw it happening and realized it wasn\u2019t a fad. Fads come and go. He knew this was a trend, and he was smart enough to figure out how to be both ahead of and driving the trend, selling this very specific lifestyle. Now it\u2019s more than just hats and clothing he\u2019s selling. It\u2019s stuff for home, stuff for your yard. You can buy your Margaritaville drinks and mix them in your Margaritaville blender. There are Margaritaville resorts all over the world. And that grew into the 55-plus communities. People who broke their backs working all their lives could now relax and escape. And if you look at the communities themselves, the decor, the colors, and the activities for residents all tie in with the brand, that tropical escapist concept.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n In your case study, you write how even Buffett\u2019s music is \u201con brand.\u201d That seems like something most musicians would balk at.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s the nature of music to experiment, and everybody has a different sense of where they want to go with it. Bob Dylan was the original folkie. Then he went electric, went back to blues, played \u201cDust Bowl Ballads,\u201d and moved on to American standards. Springsteen experiments too: He did rock, then folk, then more introspective things with a nod to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and then he went back to rock. Paul Simon is all over the place, from New York City to world music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Buffett is a fastball down the middle. He doesn\u2019t really experiment. He\u2019s as much of a musician as anyone else; he just does it within the context of his escapist, tropical theme. I think that was smart because that\u2019s brand positioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I talk about integrated marketing communications in class, the lesson for students is that your message, no matter the medium, has to be the same. Otherwise, your market is going to get totally confused. It\u2019s very clear what Buffett\u2019s message is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not unusual for musicians to sell T-shirts and concert tickets. But is there anyone besides Buffett who\u2019s had such success selling this sort of all-encompassing lifestyle?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Not that I\u2019ve seen. When you think about the range of things he\u2019s selling, he\u2019s really selling a way of living. And I don\u2019t know that there\u2019s been another musician who has done that. You can buy a Bob Dylan T-shirt, but who has a Bob Dylan lifestyle? Frank Sinatra was crazy huge, and maybe people occasionally wore a fedora, but you didn\u2019t decorate your home like Sinatra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It all comes back to that concept of escape. It\u2019s a very specific lifestyle. He saw it happening and built it continually from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Buffett is in his mid-70s and can\u2019t go on touring forever. What happens to the Margaritaville brand when he retires?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Margaritaville Enterprises did something smart by not using Buffett as the visual of the brand. Obviously he\u2019s the focal point, but when you see Margaritaville, you see a parrot. That can be anybody, male or female. That\u2019s the emblem of the message the company is trying to get across.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at what happened when Walt Disney wasn\u2019t around anymore. I\u2019m talking about the original Walt Disney Company, before it started buying everything up. Disney did a lot of the same things, tying its brand into leisure. It has hotels, cruises, clothing, and other things like that. There isn\u2019t anything after Disney because it\u2019s sui generis<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s unique. The same applies to Margaritaville in my mind. It\u2019s all about the theme. If you keep the dream of escape\u2014of getting away from all of the craziness we deal with\u2014alive, I don\u2019t see any reason it can\u2019t continue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Business professor John Inzero explains how Jimmy Buffett built a billion-dollar empire by selling a state of mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":14759,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"image_focus":"{\"x\":47,\"y\":7}","hide_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-currents"],"thumbnail":"![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/7\/2022\/01\/08-Jimmy-Buffet-FIN-MAX-O-MATIC-233x300.jpg\")
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