“Thank U, YES!”
Thank U, Next? More like Thank U, YES!! I am living for anything Ariana Grande, but I must say, her marketing team is quite remarkable and really knows how to make lasting impressions on her audience. From the first few clues that Ariana would allude to the classic movie Mean Girls in her hit track “Thank U, Next” it makes complete sense about the typography choices and the color combinations. The cover art is included in her music platforms on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, etc. Before Ariana released her music video which was a complete reference to the iconic movie released in 2004, I did not make much out of this graphic art. I just thought it was simple and cute and complimented the tone of the song. According to Bourne Creative, the color pink means playful, charming, feminine and tender. My only analyzation of the cover art before I understood the Mean Girls reference was that the colors used and the lipstick on the bottom right side of the graphic was meant to just represent the psychology of the color pink. But of course, Ariana’s marketing team and Ariana’s artistic expressions go way beyond what color means and I am HERE FOR IT. I think the value of a product and quality of a design is in the details and how much thought is put into it. If you make something just to make it pretty and to make it stand out visually, it might not end up making sense. It might also not be that meaningful to you at the end of the day and that will be evident when viewers understand the context of what you created. The cover art is of course, in parallel relation to the Burn Book from the movie, which was created by the main characters as a secret journal including all the juicy secrets of people they knew in relation to love, passion, aggression, and all things spice. Pink can kind of be a passive color that is super sweet and charming but may have underlying intentions; it could be two-way. But for Ariana’s case, she concludes her past relationships in a celebratory way; making something sad into something motivational, which puts such a calming and satisfactory tone to her graphic. In a way, her different fonts of the recurring “Thank U, Next” text on the cover may reference all of her different relationships that played out in their own ways but maybe I am just interpreting it past what it was meant to be. Either way, I love this and whoever her marketing team is… 5 STARS!
I completely agree! She (and her management) clearly have a great grasp of her target audience. Tying her own work into beloved franchises amongst women our age is an excellent marketing strategy. It also serves to make herself more relatable. It’s almost like she’s putting herself in the shoes of any woman our age. Especially with social media, I’ve noticed a lot of artists attempting to brand themselves as being more like their audience in an attempt to boost interest for their product, but none have done as great a job as Ariana has recently. Marketing strategies like this are especially interesting to me, because it almost changes the dynamic from artist/fan into something more balanced; it makes the audience into her peers.