Lady gaga on success

Please read the case below titled “Strategy and success: Lady Gaga and Jeff Bezos” and post your 250 word answer online onto Canvas in the Assignment link to the following questions:

What do these two examples tell us about the characteristics of a strategy that is conducive to success?
In both stories, can their success be attributed to any common factors of strategy? If so, please identify five common factors that stand out?
Please note that your answer to the questions must be around 250 words in full sentences with proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar. No abbreviations, such as those used in instant-messaging, will be acceptable. Short answers of one or two sentences will receive lower points.

Opening Case: Strategy and success: Lady Gaga and Jeff Bezos

Lady Gaga

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga, is the most successful popular entertainer to emerge in the 21st century. Her three albums,The Fame, released August 2008, Born This Way, released May 2011, and Artpop, released November 2013, sold a total of 26 million copies by the end of 2013. Her Monster Ball completed a 2009 concert world tour that grossed $227.4 million (the highest for any debut artist). She has earned five Grammy music awards and 13 MTV video music awards and places on Forbes’ listings of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women (though some way behind German Chancellor Angela Merkel).

Since dropping out of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2005, she has shown total commitment to advancing her career as an entertainer and developing her Lady Gaga persona. Gaga’s music is an appealing pastiche of Seventies glam, Eighties disco and Nineties Europop. One music critic, Simon Reynolds, described it as, ‘ruthlessly catchy, noughties pop glazed with Auto-Tune and undergirded with R&B-ish beats’.1 (Links to an external site.) Her songs embody themes of stardom, love, religion, money, identity, liberation, sexuality and individualism.

However, music is only one element in the Lady Gaga phenomenon – her achievement is based less upon her abilities as a singer or songwriter and more upon her establishing a persona which transcends pop music. Like David Bowie and Madonna before her, Lady Gaga is famous for being Lady Gaga. The Gaga persona comprises a multimedia, multifaceted offering built from an integrated array of components that include her music, her stunning visual appearance, newsworthy events, distinctive social attitudes, her personality and a set of clearly communicated values. Key among these is visual impact and theatricality. Lady Gaga’s outfits have set new standards in eccentricity and innovation. Her dresses – including her plastic bubble dress, meat dress and ‘decapitated-corpse dress’ – together with weird hairdos, extravagant hats and extreme footwear (she met President Obama in 16-inch heels) – are as well-known as her hit songs, and her music is promoted through visually stunning videos that combine fantasy, sex, sadism and science fiction. The variety of visual images she projects is such that her every appearance creates a buzz of anticipation as to her latest incarnation.