In 1976, Billy Gibbons decided he needed a break. He’d been touring almost continuously for the last three years – ever since the release of the Tres Hombres album. Now it was time for he and his other two hombres to go their separate ways for a while. It was meant to be a 90-day break; it turned into two years. That might have been enough to finish off most bands – but not ZZ Top. Gibbons wasn’t giving up. He was about to set in motion the greatest rock n roll rebrand of all time – and one rich with lessons for B2C and B2B content marketing today.
It’s not that ZZ Top didn’t have any success before 1976. Tres Hombres had given Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard their first Top 10 record – and the ability to sell out most venues they played. Their next album Fandango! had produced a Top 20 single, Tush. They had a signature blues rock-driven sound, they were known for cheeky lyrics and sexual innuendo; they were a band with a distinct, Texan brand. However, exhaustion was setting in and ZZ Top was falling victim to the law of diminishing returns. Their most recent album Tejas just hadn’t connected in the same way, despite their tiring schedule supporting it on the road.
ZZ Top could have taken a short break and then gone back to pushing their same tried and tested formula, surfing the long tail of momentum that they’d built up for themselves. Plenty of bands do exactly that. Plenty of brands and content marketers do as well. But Gibbons had other ideas.
By the time ZZ Top next played together they would look very different. A few short years later, they would sound pretty different too. The wheels were (literally) turning on a breathtaking marketing makeover. It took all of their embryonic brand assets, sharpened them, differentiated them, plugged them into the best data the band had available, and then leveraged the most exciting emerging content platforms to share them with the world. It was a spectacular success. By 1983, ZZ Top would be one of the biggest bands on earth. Here’s how they did it – it’s one of the most inspiring brand and content marketing stories that I know:
Brand icons are powerful assets – whether they are recognisable characters such as Mr. Clean or Captain Birdseye, or simple symbols such as Nike’s swoosh. ZZ Top needed one – and Gibbons had already commissioned it by the time he took his two-year break. He’d asked a specialist customised car business to build him a bespoke 1933 Ford Coupé, complete with gangster-style running boards and big bold, forward-facing headlights. He wanted it painted a bright red, with extended Z shaped graphics forming stripes along the side. No band travelled around in vehicles like this. No other band would ever think to build a visual identity around one. But this was ZZ Top – and they were just getting started on redefining what visual branding could mean in the music business.
Gibbons wasn’t satisfied with rebranding how the band looked. He was interested in evolving the sound as well. ZZ Top began experimenting with synthesizers on the 1981 album El Loco – but Gibbons was interested in a more fundamental change. And like all the best content marketers, he knew that bringing in people with the right skills was the key to refreshing the content that he was putting out.
In 1982, Gibbons turned to the electronic music expertise of sound engineer Terry Manning, to help fuse the New Wave sounds of the early 80s with the band’s original Texan boogie style. It worked. The tracks they laid down together in a studio in Tennessee sounded different to anything ZZ Top had produced up to then.
The Ford was just the start. It wasn’t enough for ZZ Top to have a visual calling card – they needed a fully differentiated visual personality for the band itself. It had to feel credible, more than just a new way of dressing; it had to be something distinctly Texan that reflected their roots. The decision for Gibbons and Lee to grow chest-length beards was a masterstroke. It took commitment and it instantly differentiated them from all the hair rockers strutting around stages trying to look like Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. ZZ Top had cracked authenticity in branding long before most marketers had even heard of it. It worked too. Backed by that distinctive, differentiated look, 1979’s sixth studio album, Degüello, went Platinum
Data science is one of the hottest topics in marketing at the moment – but it’s far from a new concept. Looking for patterns and trends in the way that people consumed music delivered one of the key breakthroughs in those Tennessee sessions. Sound engineer Linden Hudson researched the tempos at which the most popular rock tracks in the charts had been recorded. His data showed that there was something very special about 120 beats to a minute. Gibbons decided to record pretty much the whole of ZZ Top’s new album at that tempo. The result? 1983’s Eliminator. It was named after Gibbons’ Ford Coupé; it had been created through a unique combination of creative collaboration and data mining. And it was about to take the world by storm.
Eliminator went on to sell over 10 million copies in the US alone, becoming one of the very rare albums to be certified Diamond. That success owed a great deal to the way that the brand evolved its content and differentiated its brand. However, it was also a direct result of their flair for leveraging these new assets on emerging content platforms. MTV had launched in 1981, establishing mass reach music video as a new marketing channel – and ZZ Top knew exactly how to use it. The band didn’t just perform its tracks on MTV; it took that iconic car and those iconic beards and used them to turn videos into a storytelling medium. It was almost as if ZZ Top had been made for MTV – but it hadn’t been. It had just been very smartly rebranded and evolved in a way that meant it was ideally positioned to take advantage.
The ZZ Top story isn’t perfect. It bugs me a bit that the band ended up in lawsuit with Linden Hudson over whether he should get writing credits for some of the tracks on Eliminator. Part of me suspects that this was another side to the marketing savvy of Billy Gibbons – he wanted to control the image of the band as three singer-songwriters who didn’t rely on outside influences.
That’s a pity, because in my mind, it’s Gibbons’ openness to new influences and wholly new creative ideas that was the real driving force behind one of the most spectacular rebrands of all time. The story of the Eliminator album shows how great content is never handed down from on high to a creative genius. It’s the result of smart creative people collaborating with others that have the skills they need; it’s the result of them staying hungry for any insights that can guide what they produce, and of committing to marketing content the way it deserves to be marketed.
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