Afrotainment rapper, Duncan, has drawn ire for faking a botched marriage proposal in an attempt to promote a new single titled Sthandwa.
Watch: Duncan fakes marriage proposal to promote music
Duncan’s latest musical offering features Thee Legacy dropped on the same day a video showing him get rejected by his ‘significant other’ at a packed public area went viral.
At first glance, the video achieves its objective. Marriage proposals that get rejected by the woman, without a doubt, garner a lot of engagement on social media.
The coincidence of Duncan’s botched proposal. matched with the poor acting performance that was displayed in the video, did not fool those who saw past the poorly executed public relations campaign.
We don’t know what’s worse, Duncan chasing clout or DJ Tira, a respected figure in South African music, propagating the fib to an extent that may have not been necessary.
In colloquial terms, this here is referred to as the ‘Do-do Brown’ — unnecessarily doing too much.
Did the stunt achieve its objective?
We will assume that the whole point behind this publicity stunt was to give Duncan’s brand reach, beyond the market his music catalogue has access to.
Duncan is from the rural parts of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). His vernacular raps, delivered on Afrobeats-meets-Maskhandi instrumentals, attracts a certain niche market.
An incident of this magnitude has the potential of shooting Duncan to the top of the South African overall trends list.
It would give him and his team the talkability they need to drive a music release campaign around his ‘wrenched heart’.
It is the type of emotional marketing that pulls the strings of our empathy hard enough for us to make choices that are uncharacteristic of our interests.
Unfortunately for Duncan and his folks at Afrotainment, people saw through the cracks of the shoddy stunt.
While his PR team did achieve the engagement objective, Duncan may not have received the response he sought from mainstream social media.
Measuring the impact that this stunt had on the release can only be subjective from our point of view. Duncan and his label will know if the clout materialised to monetary gains.
According to the rapper, who has not made any statement on the validity of the incident, _Sthandwa_ currently occupies the number 1 spot of the SA iTunes Hip-Hop charts.
If anything, Duncan’s antics exposed the sorry state of the music industry in South Africa, where established musicians are forced to chase social media clout to affect the sale of their music releases.