Daft Punk, or: Building a Massive Brand by Anti-Marketing | Weird Marketing Tales


Imagine building one of the most culturally significant bands of the 21st century.

Now imagine doing that while experimenting radically in a genre where copying others is a proven path to success. While never showing your face.

Daft Punk did just that, and their success has been remarkable. Their sophomore album, Discovery is considered the 140th best album ever on Rate Your Music. Their fourth album – released eight years after their prior studio album – hit #1 on the charts in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and a bunch of European countries.

Your grandma probably knows the words to Get Lucky by now. Pharrell, who sung on that track, said that Daft Punk was “responsible for the rise of contemporary electronic dance music.” James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem – a big deal in his own right – named checked Daft Punk multiple times in his music.

These dudes literally wore bags on their heads for interviews.

How the hell did these guys manage to succeed?

In this article, I’m going to talk about how Daft Punk got so big not just despite – but because – they broke nearly every marketing rule.

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What is a “Daft Punk” anyway?

Daft Punk is an electronic music duo formed in 1993. Their style is said to be a combination of house music with funk, techno, disco, hip hop, indie rock, and pop. This is both an accurate and comprehensive summary, and a lacking one.

The name “Daft Punk” comes from an insult a music reviewer hurled at them back when they were an indie rock band by the name of Darlin’. The fact that they made it big by literally coopting the mean words of a critic is the best Reverse Uno card I’ve ever seen played.

Now Wikipedia will tell you the guys behind Daft Punk are named Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. But the real truth is – they’re robots. On September 9, 1999, a synthesizer exploded, and when they regained consciousness, they had turned into robots.

And, indeed, this is what many people know them for. If you don’t know even one Daft Punk song, you know them as “the guys who wear robot helmets.” It’s an iconic bit of branding genius.

I think it’s important to discuss this before even getting to the music, because aggressive avoidance of celebrity status is as much a signature of Daft Punk’s work than banger beats and samples that slap. Both guys, in their teen years, saw Phantom of the Paradise (1974). In it, a guy who is grasping for fame gets horribly maimed by some music equipment and transformed into a half-human, half-machine figure with a robotic voice. It was an unsubtle, surrealist statement about the exploitative nature of the music industry and dangers of fame.

I personally believe that this movie clicked with those guys because they saw it at a young age. They coopted its imagery to come up with their helmets. They got the idea of hiding their faces from that movie. And they may very well have gotten their disdain for celebrity status from it as well, although who can really say? What we do know is that they collaborated with the film’s composer on their 2013 album, Random Access Memories. That’s just not a thing you do unless a movie really makes its mark on you.

Daft Punk could be shopping at your local Costco right now, and not a soul there would recognize them. That’s on purpose. They are anti-fame, anti-establishment to the core, which has interesting implications for both their marketing strategy and their music. It’s also how they can make crowd-pleasing mega-hits, show up in ad spots for the Gap, and not seem like massive sellouts.

Even their break-up in 2021 was anti-fame. Zero drama. Just a bizarre video of them walking off into the desert and exploding.

Now let’s talk about their music.

Daft Punk’s storied musical career

If you want a comprehensive review of Daft Punk’s discography, check out this video by Mic the Snare. He gives their work the 30 minutes it deserves, as I can regrettably only give you the radio edit in this article.

Their first album dropped in 1997, called Homework and it gave us saw raw, but innovative dance music such as Da Funk. Their music at the time was more similar to their peers in the French house scene of the time, but it even early in their career, you could hear Daft Punk developing their signature sound.

Undeterred by their transfiguration into robots in 1999, Daft Punk dropped Discovery in 2001. This gave the world hits like Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, One More Time, Face to Face, Digital Love, and Aerodynamic. This is when Daft Punk developed their signature sound, which countless imitators have attempted to copy, but no one has managed to nail. (The closest is Cross by Justice.)

They then went on to create Human After All, which was their weakest album until its songs were remixed into the stunning live album, Alive 2007. It is considered the 18th best live album of all time by Rate Your Music. You can watch the whole setlist below, but it starts around the 51 minute mark with a mix I find particularly appealing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYuD9ydQr3w

They also went onto create the soundtrack for Tron: Legacy in 2010. And then, at the second apex of their career, Daft Punk dropped Random Access Memories in 2013 after collaborating with Giorgio Moroder (who arguably put Donna Summer on the map in the 1980s), Panda Bear, Julian Casablancas from the Strokes, Nile Rodgers, and Pharrell Williams. They then proceeded to drop Get Lucky, which topped the charts, as well as some other hit singles like Lose Yourself to Dance.

After Random Access Memories, Daft Punk started to slow down, but increasingly worked with others to help them create their works. Major feathers in their cap include their work with Kanye West on his excellent rap album, Yeezus in 2013 as well as their work with the Weeknd on his Starboy album in 2016.

With all of this in mind, now we can talk about how Daft Punk transcended singles and albums to become an everlasting brand.

Daft Punk only followed one marketing rule: product-market fit

I said that Daft Punk broke all the marketing rules, but that’s not quite true. In fact, there are only really two marketing rules that matter: make something worthwhile and tell people you’ve made something worthwhile.

Making something worthwhile is another way to say “achieve product-market fit.” In the world of dance music, that means making great music and giving great performances. Daft Punk has absolutely done that, with all their albums, except for Human After All, achieving critical acclaim. Their live shows are said to have been amazing, although I’ve only experienced them through Alive 1997, Alive 2007, and bootleg footage on YouTube.

Daft Punk threaded a seemingly impossible needle: they managed to please the hardcore dance music crowd, record shop owners, and normal people at the same time. To quote LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge, “I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids. I played it at CBGB’s. Everybody thought I was crazy.”

And for what it’s worth, this has proved true in my life too. In college, when Random Access Memories dropped, Daft Punk was perhaps the one band that could unite frat boys and nerds alike.

Why does this work? I’d argue it’s because Daft Punk has a very interesting musical technique where every few measures, they’ll add an element to a song. The drums will pick up. Perhaps a synth line will come in. Maybe they’ll add vocals. What this does is keep the repetition that is so important to dance music without it feeling stale. This technique is part of why I believe Daft Punk has so many fans around the world. (See the song below for an example from their early work.)

Truth is, if you suck at what you do, you won’t go far. This is the one immutable, unchangeable marketing rule: you have to make something that people like. All the other marketing rules can be used at your discretion.

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5 paradoxical marketing techniques Daft Punk used to achieve superstardom without revealing their faces

Now you and I both know that being a good musician doesn’t guarantee success. Daft Punk was certainly well-positioned to blow up massively, but the fact that they did is no accident. Daft Punk were actually brilliant at marketing, even though they were anti-marketing, anti-fame, and anti-spotlight.

1. Daft Punk established a clear brand by never saying anything at all.

Daft Punk’s brand is heavily based in mystery. We don’t know what they look like. We don’t know what they think about culture or politics. No one knows what the relationship between the two looked like. We don’t even know why they broke up.

That’s the point.

We’re supposed to keep wondering. We’re supposed to see their reflective helmets as mirrors, grafting our own values onto cold chrome and glass.

Even in their interviews – which are exceedingly rare – they basically don’t say anything. They’re experts of circumlocution, making you feel like they’re saying something deep. Then fifteen minutes, you check the fridge and you realize you don’t know anything else about who they are.

Their helmets are logos, yes. But whereas most logos seek to be full of meaning, Daft Punk’s is meant to strip it away. Yeah, you talk about the robots and how cute the gimmick is, but at the end of the day, because we know so little about them, we must talk about them in terms of the music they make and the deliberate actions they take. There is no celebrity gossip about Daft Punk to detract from their image.

2. Daft Punk earned media attention by avoiding media attention.

Because Daft Punk never revealed their faces, rarely took interviews, and never said anything of importance when they did, Daft Punk built up a reputation of being elusive. To land an interview about Daft Punk was to do the nigh impossible.

This would normally be a huge mistake. In fact, I actively push my marketing clients to seek out attention because the hermit routine seldom works. But in Daft Punk’s case, it worked very well.

In 2013, when news of a fourth album was on the way, I would frequently search for more information, but find very, very little. But when meaningful news did come out, like a fifteen second song teaser, it got an enormous amount of attention. All the online magazines like Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, and NME had to talk about Daft Punk and their progress toward their next great work.

This plays back into their brand of being unknowable and mysterious figures. By depriving the media environment of any meaningful content, the slightest scrap of news took on great significance. This is the same logic that makes fancy restaurants give you tiny portions – they know you will savor it more.

3. Daft Punk cashed in, but never sold out.

You might think that Daft Punk is some sort of anti-capitalist group. The kind that might burn a million British pounds like another famed danced group, the KLF did in 1994. But that’s just not so.

Daft Punk has been in commercials. They’ve worked with pop stars as big as the Weeknd and Kanye West. They’re not afraid to network and get paid well.

When Daft Punk was most active, “sellout” was still a devastating insult. To sell out meant to give up on your creative interests and purity for a paycheck. These days you don’t hear the term so much because everybody is broke as hell.

This, once again, ties back into their mystique. When they starred in commercials or decided to start working with big stars, it seemed like they were doing it for fun and for art. We know how much they shun fame, and it’s not a stretch to assume they feel the same way about grotesque amounts of money too.

But for all we know, this could be wrong. Maybe they were doing cost-benefit analyses. Maybe they were counting pennies and nickels. If they were, they weren’t obnoxious or obvious about it.

Perhaps most importantly, though, despite working with bigger and bigger stars later in their career, Daft Punk kept the quality high. I’d argue that Daft Punk’s work with the Weeknd was the best thing he had going for him before Blinding Lights came out. They took their sweet time between albums, seldom publishing anything less than stellar. Even when working with a big Disney film – Tron: Legacy – they put time and care into creating a soundtrack that, while it doesn’t stand on its own, worked perfectly within the context of the film.

4. Daft Punk was consistent but always changing.

You recognize Daft Punk immediately when you hear them. They have consistent trademarks. You can hear it in their sweet, honey-dipped vocoder vocals. You can feel it in their 1970’s soul, funk, and disco samples. It’s there in the moments where they work real human tenderness into an electronic soundscape, like in Something About Us.

But every single album was very different than the one before. Homework was a dense brick of late 1990s house music bangers. Discovery brought in a certain airiness and lightness that made it great for radio play. Human After All was a grungy mix of squelchy synths and ultra-repetitive lyrics that, as luck would have it, mixed super well into Alive 2007, itself an innovative album that showed people how electronic acts can actually play live.

And then, finally, to top it all off, Random Access Memories was a 1970’s and 1980’s throwback album featuring, at times, full orchestras and unaltered vocals. Sure, all the dance floor tricks were still at play, but Random Access Memories was a surprisingly analog sound.

Daft Punk took their sweet time between albums. Daft Punk always sounded like Daft Punk, but when they were putting out new albums, you’d never be able to guess what was coming next. Finding that balance of novelty and familiarity is a trick that even the best marketers can seldom manage.

5. Daft Punk attracted the famous, but never bent for them.

Most of the time, when artists reach out to people more famous than them, they change to meet them. Daft Punk said “take it or leave it.” If you wanted to work with Daft Punk, they would either produce your album or you’d be a guest on theirs. Rumor has it that they didn’t even tell their collaborators the context in which their vocals or other contributions would be used.

Now normally, that would close a lot of doors. I’d tell my marketing clients not to make too many demands, especially not to people with bigger audiences. But Daft Punk is Daft Punk, and they could get away with it.

I could cite a lot of examples, but one stands out above the others. Take Giorgio Moroder. He’s a big deal – he basically invented disco as we know it. If you listen to I Feel Love, that’s his beat and his synthesizers. Without him, there’s no Daft Punk. He’s like their spiritual father.

Daft Punk asked him to give an interview on his life and career in music. They didn’t tell him how it would be used. They then took bits and pieces of it and sprinkled it throughout the lovingly crafted 9-minute song, Giorgio by Moroder.

It takes enormous guts to be able to tell one of your biggest inspirations and heroes that you will be calling the shots. But that’s exactly what Daft Punk did. They never made even one appearance that was inconsistent with their mysterious image. They never made a single single that they didn’t want associated with their name. So even as the collaborated with bigger stars, they never once diluted their brand.

Final Thoughts

Daft Punk managed to become some of the biggest celebrities of the 21st century without ever showing their faces. Both band members would deny it to the day they die, but they were brilliant at marketing. You have to be brilliant to know which rules to break and which ones to follow, and to know how precisely to break them well.

They turned mysteriousness into a calling card, and that got the media to eat out of their hands. Their quality seldom dipped, and their sound never got stale. They were relentless guardians of their brand, making big celebrities and even their personal heroes work within their rules.

All of this was possible not only because of their business acumen, but because they were just so damn good at making music too. Even though they’re not cranking out music anymore, we can still learn lessons from them.

Think marketing is confusing as hell? You’re not alone.

Join over 1,000 other confused, but curious folks. Download Weird Marketing’s FREE Experimental Marketing Guide.


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