The Marketing Bestie Podcast with zoeunlimited - trust me, i’m the next sabrina carpenter

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Dove cameron was the next sabrina carpenter....Save 10+ hours on your presentation. Try Gamma for FREE https://taap.it/trygamma✍🏻FREE EMAIL LIST https://tapx.it/stanzoeunlimited😋today's flavor is apple 🍎 https://taap.it/salud get 10% off with ZOELearn & Grow with me.💖 Instagram: https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedig💜 TikTok: https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedtiktok🖤 Listen on Apple & Spotify: https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedapple https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedspotify🪭 All my outfits https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedltk👩🏻‍💻 LinkedIn https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimitedlinkedin🛒 Amazon Essentials https://tapthe.link/zoeunlimited👉use code ZOEUNLIMITED for 10% off ALL travels on Klook https://t.ly/aA76T📧 Business inquiries: [e-mail] //🕙Timestamps: 0:00 Intro3:59 Dove 1.04:55 Dove 2.05:31 Branding misstep 17:30 Branding misstep 29:02 Branding misstep 310:45 Branding SOS

Money can buy you pretty, but can it buy you brand? Dove Dove Cameron! Should have been the next arena carpenter. But how is one small mistake? Delaying Dove Cameron's throne as main pop girl for 13 years. What's a Dove Cameron? Just like I don't know who she is anymore. Cused of queer baiting.

I have no idea what I'm doing. You define it. If there was someone born to be the next big thing, it must be Dove Cameron. The face card, the voice card, the fan base. Casually wins an Emmy at 22. Casually carries not just one, not just two, but three movie franchises. And of course, casually hits Billboard 100, but somehow, there's still a way to mess everything up.

This feels so fake and manufactured. Her acting is bad. Why is everyone's favorite Disney girl? Still, not a main pop girl. Three years ago, it seemed like Dove Cameron was going to be our next main pop girl. No, it's not just because of a changing face, or deleting all her music, Let's talk about Dove Cameron deleting all of her old music. All of Dove's previous singles completely disappeared.

Like this person says, I haven't forgotten you yet. First of all, same. I still remember her purple hair from my baby sister's Disney Channel time. But also in my memory, she was the purple-haired Disney Girl, then suddenly a baddie and boyfriend about to be a main pop girl. And then...

Disappeared! What could have been her moment? Is now a Sabrina Carpenter World. Mind you, both were Disney Girls trying to escape the Disney label. Both were blonde. Bond, conventionally attractive, hyper-feminine pop girls. Both have strong voices. Both are the underdogs.

But one decision made all the difference. And it's not too late. So what is that one invisible mistake? What would you describe this current era of yourself as? Oh, I wouldn't. I give up the right to define any of my ongoing eras. As your marketing bestie, who graduated, who graduated top 1% UCLA business economics

with a background in marketing, We are going to explore how being hotter can still fail you if you don't have a strong brand to back it up. By brand, I don't just mean slapping your face on an epee. It is how your future college, future boss, future boyfriend sees you. At first glance, I feel like they're misleading you. And yes, you have one. I'm creating this series to analyze pop culture icons from a marketing perspective because I hate seeing talented people waste their potential due to branding.

And I hate to see you waste 10 hours on a present. It's not 2006 anymore. Why are you still making ugly slides from scratch? Our partner Gamma saves you so much time and frustration with slides for free. So you can focus on building your brand and not changing the font of every single slide. Create any presentation in minutes. Yep, minutes. Using Gamma's templates. Let's say I want a brand advisory deck for Dove.

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to keep our community small to ambitious people who want to understand pop culture through a smarter branding perspective please do not subscribe if you're not ready to expand your mind so how is the next it girl making the one mistake of stepping on her own toes. Dove Cameron's fans are very concerned about her. That led to three more branding missteps. Did she just get up that day and just wanted to choose violent? And what is the branding SOS before?

It's too late. Let's first understand. I'm a fake. This is fake. This is fake. Dove 1.0 was meant to be a star. She began acting at 8 already in LeMay's at 11 and by 16, star in the dual lead role of Liv and Maddie.

Hi! I'm Dove Cameron from Live and Maddie. and you are watching Disney Channel. The pilot episode alone gained 5.8 million viewers. And by 17, her cover of Imagine Dragons peaked Billboard for three weeks. Liv and Maddie brought Dove to a massive audience. She is the new favorite Disney Girl. And Descendants got her two, Billboard Hot 100.

But there was one small problem. You can play a Disney Girl when you're 16. You can play that when you're 26? But can you play the same role when you're 36? Hence, Dove Cameron wanted a clean slate from a very very successful purple-haired Disney child. And descendants, huge. Would you ever do another one?

No. No. No. But this is where trouble began. I love like dark stuff. Dove 2.0. It's fun. It's chic.

There are two types of rebrands. Most artists have Aeros. Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpeter, Lana Dau Re. Dove's Disney twin Sabrina Carpeter had five quiet albums before breaking out. And if you watch her first music videos, you'll see zero trace of her baby doll aesthetic, no bombshell blow out, and even

her voice is not short and sweet. However, it is the continuous growth and experimentation that makes her Sabrina. But Ms. Dove Cameron had a different idea. The second time, her rebrand. Branding, Ms. Step 1. No evolution, just deletion. Off the whole catalog twice, and it all started with something great happening. Her song boyfriend going viral in 20, Perfect opportunity to rebrand from Disney. But instead of using it as momentum for her next songs to build a cohesive universe, what was her girl Dove busy doing? Deleting all her prior songs.

Poof, vanished from Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. Like they never existed. But that's all good because Dove Camera has been working super hard on this new era. In fact, she was quote, inches away from not one, not two, but 60 new songs major. Burn the past and announce a new era. Except what actually came out five months later were four new songs with four old songs bundled into an EP of 22 minutes. Alchemical volume 1 out of 2.

Quote, so the other 50 songs are coming in volume 2, I guess. Except there is no volume 2. And there is no new era. Because Volume 1 debut with just 1.4 million streams on Spotify versus the 810 million streams on Boyfriend. And Dove Cameron again. scrapped the entire new era and publicly disown the first volume. There is no alchemical volume too, unfortunately, but actually fortunately. So what started as 60 new songs is now just one virus on, while all pass-ons are deleted.

Now Dove sadly wasn't able to follow this up with another big hit. The hype eventually just went away. The saddest part is a lot of times good art just needs time to be appreciated. And no, might just mean not yet. It's like throwing your pot of plant away after putting the seed in after five days. Even Addison Ray kept her old music after deleting her entire Instagram feed during her rebrand. And when she finally broke out with Di Pepsi, all those quote, cringy songs began to be appreciated. Addison Ray does not get enough credit for the rebrand she did.

I was like she is a proper pop star. But for Dove, what's been deleted aren't just songs, but also. Branding misstep two, identity. Or more accurately, identity whiplash. Starting with visual identity. Specifically, with hair. In 2021, Dove Cameron went dark brunette, calling it a, quote,

total identity shift because she had, quote, so much genuine emotional pain attached to being a blonde. Valid. The dark aesthetics is a direct visual change from her Disney past. However, in 2024, she's blonde again and calls her prior statement, quote, silly and camp. No worries, but guess what happens in 2025? Yep, we are back to dark brown again.

Each rebrand felt like a mistake or a regret. That aside, let's look at the core character. Sabrina spent 10 years building one brand. They've spent 10 years rebuilding several brands. And that's the key most people miss for a strong brand. You don't need to do more, you need to actually do less. I'm not telling you to be lazy. I'm telling you to double down on that one thing that brings you more results

than the 10 other things draining your energy. Yes, experiment to get data, but at one point, you need to do something with the data. We as audiences know exactly who Sabrina is. Funny, flirty, self-aware, slightly chaotic. We know who Olivia Rodrigo is. Emotional, dramatic, diary-like, rock-inspired. But who is dove?

Well, depending on the season, she's Disney Princess, Dark Fairy, Fashion music, queer icon, alt-artist, baddy, sad girl. Without exactly committing to one, which leads to branding misstep three. Audience will tackle this in two layers. Sonically and culturally. and culturally. Sonically, Dove sounds like eight different people in the same EP.

Sometimes it's Billy Alice's whisper pop, sometimes singer-songwriter ballads, sometimes atmospheric electropop, sometimes dark alternative pop. Boyfriend and Breakfast actually have a coherent sound and vibe to them. That danger, tension, and power. But then the releases that follow shot at different artistic directions, which is Latin for confusion. Because each of her songs sounds like a different artist, it is very hard to have a quick,

audience, which means culturally. It is hard to say who is Dove Cameron's target audience, her intended audience. Based on her music, visuals, fashion interviews, and branding seems like Jersey Millennial Women, LGBTQ Plus Women, fans of dark feminine aesthetics, seeing fans that overlap with Billy Elish, Halsey Banks, Lord, but her actual audiences are quite fragmented. You have Group 1, former Disney fans, aka still her largest foundation. Group 2, LGBTQ plus audience that searched for boyfriend group three beauty and fashion followers who like her visual branding and group four

alternative pop listeners the smallest but most music forward segment these are people who genuinely follow her music the thing is most successful artists have one dominant audience Sabrina girls 16 to 26 who want fun and flirty confident pop with a wink Olivia girls processing emotions and heartbreak Duff cameras target audience requires a paragraph three asterix and a flow charge that's not because her audience doesn't exist, but because every time she gets close to claiming it, she resets.

So what is the branding SOS that can clean this up? First, picking a lane and commit for 18 months minimum. Dove Cameron doesn't need a rebrand. She needs commitment. The brand is actually there. 810 million streams on once on. That's a warm audience sitting right there. A number one global prime video show

that just introduced her to millions of new people. A genuinely distinct. look, nobody else in pop looks like her right now. A real sonic fingerprint in the boyfriend in breakfast lane. Charlie XEX owns hyperpop. Sabrina owns retroflirty. Olivia owns teenage heartbreak. The dark, adult, emotionally complex, visually cinematic pop space has room for Dove Cameron.

Only if she stays there long enough or people to associate her with it, which leads to... Second, stop explaining, start repeating. Audiences don't need a new identity every era. They need the same identity. expressed in new ways. If Sabrina is the Gigi Hadid of Disney Child to artist, I see Dove Cameron as the Bella Hadid, the beautiful and complicated dark horse, but it needs to be repeated to stick. Every time she tells an interviewer, oh, that wasn't really me about a previous era, she gives casual listeners a reason not to invest. Taylor Swift never

disowned an era. She re-contextualizes it. There is a huge difference between I've grown, and oops, ignore that. Third, use the 55 days momentum immediately. Dove has a hot window right now. New audience, fresh attention, people googling her name. That window is approximately six months before it closes. A single, visual, and interview about music, something needs to drop into that attention while it's live.

And lastly, for Dove Cameron, myself, and anyone creating anything. Be impatient with input, but patient with output. I firmly believe that no effort goes to waste. And all the quote mistakes will build just a foundation for the path you're meant to be on. But let me know if you think Dove Cameron can be the next it girl. If you want to understand pop culture through a smarter branding perspective, follow the pot for more. Give it a five-star review. It's completely free and will help the show help you.

This is your marketing bestie Zoe Unlimited. Episodes are available on all podcast networks, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. And if you didn't hate this episode, I know you might not hate this. These other two I made just for you.