The Oprah Phenomenon

Oprah Winfrey’s Branding of Personal Empowerment

277 Oprah Winfrey’s Branding of Personal Empowerment Damiana Gibbons Fresh from the successful launch of Oprah’s Book Club and the continued success of The OprahWinfrey Show, Winfrey launched O, the Oprah Magazine in May–June 2000. In that premier issue, OprahWinfrey proclaimed her desire to guide her readers toward personal empowerment while linking their success to her own self-empowerment:“This is the defining question of my life: How do you use your life to best serve yourself and extend that to the world? One answer is this magazine. To be able to share all the things I have learned and have access to other people’s wisdom, and then put that into words that can benefit you, is a challenge and thrill for me.”1 Ideally, both parties gain some benefits from the magazine.Winfrey gets “a challenge and thrill,” and readers get “all the things [she has] learned” and “access to other people’s wisdom.” Winfrey takes the wisdom of experts, combines it with her own,and presents it to the public,thus fashioning herself as an icon for self-empowerment.The readers, in turn, become recipients of Winfrey’s knowledge.This interaction betweenWinfrey and her readers may seem like a win-win situation,but there is a subtle manipulation of message occurring here. Lynette Clemetson, in a Newsweek article that declared Winfrey one of the “Women of the Century,” summarized O, the Oprah Magazine beautifully: Without a single guide to thin thighs or a saucier sex life, O is a glossy rendering of Winfrey’s on-air motivational crusade,  Damiana Gibbons encouraging readers to revamp their souls the way Martha Stewart helps them revamp their kitchens. With articles on topics like women who rush too much, soul-searching interviews with celebrities like Sidney Poitier and flourishes like pull-out quotes from the likes of Winston Churchill and Deepak Chopra, O is reeling in a whole new breed of Oprah devotees: professionals with little time to watch her show.And with 150 ad pages per issue (stellar for even the hottest mags), it has Madison Avenue types paying new attention to the woman who used to cry with dysfunctional families on TV.2 The idea that the magazine symbolizes Winfrey’s “motivational crusade , encouraging readers to revamp their souls,” holds much truth.The diversity of self-help gurus and content, such as the “soul-searching interviews” and “pull-out quotes,” speaks to the tightly controlled userfriendliness of O.The claim thatWinfrey is attempting to gain a new demographic of “professionals with little time to watch her show” is close to the mark in terms of the intended audience for this magazine, which is clearly indicated by the success stories included. Last, the notion that Winfrey has become a financial powerhouse in another medium with extensive advertising shows that Winfrey’s goal blends seemingly “selfless ” self-help messages with a sharp eye for the financial bottom line. More than self-help or spiritual guidance, then, O is a forum for Oprah Winfrey to “brand” self-empowerment in general. In this process of branding, any product or idea that appears in the magazine is labeled “Oprah.” Essentially,Winfrey tells female consumers that if they strive to be as much like her as possible, they can create for themselves personal empowerment or fulfillment, just as she has.They need only buy the products or consume the ideas she advertises. More important, Winfrey, as the “Oprah” icon, also appropriates intellectual property, such as aesthetic appeal or interviewee responses, as an indirect method of branding those ideas as“Oprah’s.”The irony in the self-help messages in O is substantial: the readers’“self-help” must be overseen by a powerful icon if it is to succeed.Winfrey’s branding of the goods and ideas in O form the foundation for how she controls not only her message of generalized self-help but also her readers’ self-empowerment. She sells the idea that she will provide a clear path to self-empowerment, thus branding the path and the audience’s self-empowerment. Readers Oprah Winfrey’s Branding of Personal Empowerment  participate in consuming the self-help by creating an identity that is similar to “Oprah.”All they need to do is assemble the various parts of the “Oprah” program—advice from her gurus, her favorite things, her favorite books, and so forth—to gain their new, improved identity.The...