Material Girl. Madonna (1984)
A song about valuing men by their money, performed by an artist who then spent four decades demonstrating control over her own commercial image. The song is slight. What happened around it is the reason it belongs here.
What the song is about
A narrator who states plainly that she is interested in wealth, delivered without apology. Written by Peter Brown and Robert Rans, not by Madonna, which is worth knowing because the public reading has always treated it as autobiography.
The video, directed by Mary Lambert, restages the Marilyn Monroe diamonds number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the framing device has the suitor win her with a cheap bunch of flowers rather than jewellery. The video contradicts the song. Almost nobody remembers the contradiction.
Why it belongs in a marketing reference
Because it is the clearest demonstration available that the audience takes the hook and discards the qualification.
The song had an ironic frame. The video had a counter-argument built into its plot. Neither survived contact with the public, which extracted three words, attached them to the artist permanently, and ignored everything else. Madonna has spent forty years being described by a phrase from a song she did not write.
For anyone writing marketing copy this is the most useful cautionary tale in the section. If your message has a clever qualification, assume the qualification will be lost and only the blunt part will travel. That is not an argument against nuance. It is an argument for making sure the blunt part is something you are willing to be known by.
The honest complication
The reading above is tidy and the reality is that the association was also commercially useful to her for a long time. Being misread as a material girl was not obviously a cost. Artists and brands can profit from a simplification they did not choose, and pretending otherwise is sentimental.
If you run the company rather than the marketing
The practical lesson is about what survives compression.
Every description of your company gets shortened as it travels. Your positioning statement becomes a sentence, the sentence becomes a phrase, and the phrase is what a prospect repeats to a colleague who was not in the room. You do not control the compression and you cannot add a footnote to it.
So the test for any positioning is not whether it is accurate in full. It is what survives when it is cut to five words by somebody who was half listening.
Try it. Ask three people who know your business to describe it in one short sentence, without preparation. The variation in their answers is your real positioning, and if it contains a flattering oversimplification you have not chosen, that is now part of your brand whether you like it or not.
This is also why qualifying language in marketing tends to be wasted effort. The qualifier is the first thing dropped.
Sources
Madonna, Like a Virgin, Sire Records, 1984. Written by Peter Brown and Robert Rans. Video directed by Mary Lambert.