Kanye West, from exclusivity to discounts: The rapper’s latest strategy to promote himself

The Super Bowl, that global flea market interrupted by a football game, always sparks powerful conversations, especially around the ads through which companies vie for the attention of the 202 million viewers who watched the event on television this year. This time, among the welter of actors, actresses and singers who swell their bank accounts by appearing for a few seconds in an advertising space (from Ben Affleck selling donuts to Beyoncé promoting cell phones), the always controversial and increasingly erratic Kanye West, now known as Ye, has joined in. And he did so in an essentially homespun way: with a video he recorded on his cell phone.

Shot inside a moving vehicle with poor lighting, the American rapper and entrepreneur tersely and directly addresses the audience: “Hi everyone, I’m Ye and this is my commercial. Since we spent all the money on the ad space, we didn’t spend any on the ad itself.” The 30-second clip cost nothing to record and $7 million to air during Super Bowl commercial breaks. But if the strategy is surprising and more typical of guerrilla marketing — a euphemism for “no budget” — so is the purpose of the video: it announces that all Yeezy fashion collection’s clothing can be purchased on its website for $20. That is a derisory price when we consider that one of those products, the Yeezy Pods boots, went on sale for $200 in December.

From exclusivity to discounts

Weeks ago, West had already announced that he intended to discount his brand’s garments. Those statements, like everything that comes out of his mouth, aroused suspicion. After all, we are talking about an artist known for announcing the release of his albums and then delaying them for as long as he wanted. In this case, he kept his promise, which coincides with the release of his new album, Vultures, on which he collaborated with fellow rapper Ty Dolla Sign. While the decision is surprising, it stems from a strategic paradigm shift for Yeezy, the firm through which West partnered with Adidas from 2015 until 2022, when the sports company terminated the collaboration following several anti-Semitic comments that the artist made in public.

Since its beginnings, the Yeezy brand has been based on exclusivity and limited access to its products, especially the sneakers that made West an icon of streetwear fashion. Each launch became a challenge for those who wanted their own shoes, first with limited pairs in physical stores and later with sweepstakes through websites and apps to buy them. It’s a strategy that, as with other brands, fostered a resale market that the investment bank TD Cowen valued at $30 billion worldwide in 2023. The model that sought an almost unattainable status of exclusivity has been losing steam in recent years with a saturated market and inflated figures.

West’s decision comes during a popularity crisis for one of the most influential personalities in global music over the past decade. It may seem like just another of the artist’s attempts to attract attention, or one more sign of his increasingly drifting character. But if we go by the data that he himself posted on Instagram, it also reflects a commercial strategy that generated $19.3 million (almost €18 million) in a single day. Viewed differently, no matter how far removed from reality West seems, it serves as a way to generate attention that gets converted into money.

A series of catastrophic scandals

October 2022 seemed like the beginning of the end for Kanye West’s Midas touch in music and fashion, but in reality his outbursts began long before that. As one half of one of the entertainment industry’s most powerful and influential couples (with Kim Kardashian) for years, his divorce — which was made official that same year — seemed to inaugurate a freefall in which each news item created more doubt about his ability to recover as a public figure. Since then, he has turned the details of the custody of his children with Kardashian into headline fodder and social media tirades. He also attacked his ex-wife’s various partners, including comedian Pete Davidson, with whom he engaged in a running argument in the media that called West’s mental health into question. But the point of no return seemed to come with the artist’s statements on slavery, questioning of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Semitic comments.

Two years later, West continues to spark conversation, sometimes portrayed by the media as a buffoon of the constant attention era, but always present in one way or another. That machinery of generating controversy encompasses almost everything: his rudeness to his fans with continuous announcements of new songs that almost never materialize, his aesthetic decisions (one of the most recent was a titanium cover for his teeth, leading to a rumor that he had several teeth removed) and his relationship with his new wife, Bianca Censori, on whom many believe he exerts an inordinate influence, choosing her outfits and supposedly having her model at his whim. That slew of scandals and chaos may have ended Kanye West’s credibility as an artist for the moment, but it has not stopped his brand.

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