Barbie summer, hot girl summer, and now… Brat summer. In the past few years, the internet (and more specifically Gen Z and millennials) started coining these terms, inspired by trending media, from movie releases like Barbie and Oppenheimer, to songs like Megan Thee Stallion’s Hot Girl, to now Charlie XCX’s album Brat.

Charli XCX is by no means a stranger to the mainstream. Her previous album Crash was well received by the public and critics alike, but it has nothing on Brat, which took on a life of its own, and with the help of the Brat marketing campaign, permeated online culture like nothing we’ve seen this year. It inspired a slew of memes, a viral TikTok dance, and even managed to influence the US presidential elections.

The marketing strategy behind Brat is what made it so ubiquitous that even if you wanted to, you couldn’t escape it, so today we’ll dissect the Brat marketing strategy and look at how brands have been jumping on the trend.

The Lessons We Can Learn from the Brat Marketing Campaign

Build Community and Generate Hype

First and foremost, Brat creates a community based around authenticity – Charli herself describes being a brat as being messy and making mistakes. In a culture which is moving away from polished and overly-edited content as the norm, Brat came at exactly the right time to spearhead messy, ironic and ultimately authentic content.

The album’s now inescapable cover featuring the word Brat written on a neon lime green background in a stretched out Arial font has a huge part to play in the virality of the album. It’s a simple yet memorable aesthetic, that is most importantly, easily replicable. 

The success of the Brat marketing campaign is down to these 2 things: replicability and co-creation.

There are multiple ways in which people can replicate and take part in the Brat trend. The Brat Generator allowed people to “bratify” their profile photos and easily create memes in the same style, the viral TikTok dance to the song Apple had everyone from celebrities to your dog (quite literally, people were filming their dogs and cats doing the dance) join in. 

Open Instagram, and you’ll inevitably see people with bright green profile photos, open TikTok and you’ll inevitably see someone doing the Apple dance. The Brat marketing campaign created a community, and so of course, brands wanted in on that. 

This is actors Daisy Edgar Jones and Glenn Powell as a part of the campaign to promote the movie Twisters

Simplicity is Key

It’s an extremely easy bandwagon to jump on, and as a result, some brands captured the spirit of the Brat marketing campaign, managing to create viral content.

The first example being AirBaltic – their branding is lime green to begin with so they renamed themselves AirBrat getting over 400,000 views on TikTok.

Food brand Field & Roast put up a Brat Wurst billboard in Toronto garnering tons of press coverage.

These brands managed to capture the tongue-in-cheek, simple and authentic spirit of the Brat marketing campaign, and audiences rewarded them for it.

So, the lesson for brands is clear – be reactive and jump on trends, but only if you can really add to the conversation in a meaningful way.

We Discuss the Brat Marketing Campaign With the BBC

Due to the timely manner in which we explored the Brat marketing campaign in this blog, the piece has been ranking well in organic search, leading to us being contacted by the producers of the BBC World Business Report, who were planning a segment about how Brat Summer took the world of social media by storm. 

I gave the following interview, which was included in their episode released on Tuesday September 3rd 2024, discussing the power of the Brat campaign. Have a listen below.