What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Marilyn Monroe

Sarah Tucker

There are few business schools that include Marilyn Monroe on the syllabus, which is a pity because she understood several things about branding, perception, narrative control and human behaviour long before consultants began charging substantial sums of money to explain them to other people.

Most people associate Monroe with Hollywood, celebrity and a white dress that achieved almost as much fame as its owner, rather than with strategy, intellectual property, resilience or entrepreneurship. Yet while researching my chapter for Encounters with Marilyn Monroe: Celebrating 100 Years, I found myself increasingly convinced that many modern founders have more in common with Marilyn Monroe than they might initially care to admit, largely because they face remarkably similar challenges around reinvention, perception and control.

The version of Monroe inherited by popular culture is familiar enough. A vulnerable blonde. A tragic star. A woman whose life appears to consist largely of photographs, romances and eventual catastrophe. The difficulty is not that this version is entirely untrue but that it obscures a far more interesting reality, because Norma Jeane Mortenson was not born famous, wealthy or connected, which tends to be regarded as a disadvantage in most industries except motivational speaking, where overcoming adversity is often treated as a valuable commercial asset after the event.

What Monroe appeared to understand, perhaps instinctively, was that people do not merely respond to products, services or individuals. They respond to stories. Business people often speak about narrative as though they have discovered something profound, despite storytellers having quietly cornered the market in narratives several thousand years earlier. Investors buy stories about the future. Customers buy stories about identity. Employees increasingly choose organisations whose values reflect stories they wish to tell about themselves. Monroe grasped this before many corporations did, and the creation of Marilyn Monroe was not simply an exercise in image but an exercise in positioning.

She became memorable because she occupied a distinctive place in the public imagination, although the difficulty with successful narratives is that they eventually develop lives of their own. Many entrepreneurs discover this at precisely the moment they think they have succeeded. A business begins with one founder and one idea. Over time customers, investors, journalists, competitors and increasingly algorithms begin constructing their own versions of what that business represents, after which the founder discovers that the company now exists simultaneously in several realities, a situation that sounds philosophical until investors become involved.

Monroe experienced precisely the same problem. Hollywood loved the Marilyn Monroe story because it was simple, profitable and easy to market. The complication was that it left very little room for the actual woman. As contributors to the centenary collection observe, Monroe was intelligent, analytical, ambitious and determined to be taken seriously, qualities that sat rather awkwardly beside the stereotype that had become commercially successful. Hollywood preferred to tell a story about a beautiful young woman discovered by chance and transformed into a star through the wisdom of studio executives, partly because this had the additional advantage of allowing the studio executives to remain the heroes of their own story. Organisations have always shown a marked preference for complexity when producing annual reports and simplicity when describing human beings.

That tension between public narrative and private reality should feel familiar to many entrepreneurs. At what point does a successful brand become a trap? Many founders spend years attempting to achieve visibility, only to discover that visibility and understanding are not remotely the same thing. A company may become famous for one thing while internally attempting to become something else entirely. Customers often cling to old narratives long after founders have moved on to new ones, largely because changing one’s mind requires effort and most people have perfectly adequate uses for their available energy already.

Over the years I have interviewed enough actors, musicians, broadcasters and public figures to develop a healthy scepticism about public identities. The person who eventually sits down for an interview often bears only a passing resemblance to the version described in publicity material, not because anyone is necessarily being dishonest but because human beings are complicated and stories are efficient. Publicists simplify because it is their job. Journalists simplify because they have deadlines. Audiences simplify because they have lives. Somewhere along the way reality develops a habit of disappearing, after which everyone seems mildly surprised to discover that human beings are considerably more complex than their publicity photographs suggested. Journalists like to imagine they reveal people. In practice, we occasionally contribute to hiding them.

Founders experience much the same thing because markets rarely encounter the whole person. They encounter a story, and stories have a habit of becoming more influential than the people who originally created them.

This is one reason Monroe’s decision to establish Marilyn Monroe Productions in 1955 remains so significant. At a time when Hollywood studios exercised extraordinary control over performers, she attempted to regain ownership of her career and creative direction. Today we might describe that as vertical integration, founder control or strategic independence. In 1955 it was more commonly described as a young actress becoming inconvenient. History tends to celebrate disruptors once they have become successful enough to be described as visionaries, although before that point they are frequently dismissed as difficult by people who would strongly prefer everything to remain exactly as it is.

Another lesson emerges from resilience. Entrepreneurs frequently talk about resilience as though it were a personality trait that can be downloaded from a leadership podcast. Resilience is usually a consequence of necessity. People become resilient because circumstances leave them little alternative. Monroe’s life contained repeated setbacks, disappointments and failures. What distinguished her was not an absence of difficulty but a willingness to continue despite it, which is considerably less glamorous than motivational speakers generally imply but rather more useful.

There is also a lesson about perception. Edward de Bono spent much of his career explaining that perception matters more than intelligence because perception determines what we notice in the first place. Highly intelligent people frequently miss opportunities because they are looking in the wrong direction. Monroe’s life provides an unusual example. For decades people looked at Marilyn Monroe and saw glamour. Increasingly historians, biographers and cultural commentators are examining exactly the same evidence and seeing entrepreneurship, reinvention and strategic thinking. The facts themselves have not changed. What has changed is the angle from which people are viewing them, which is often where the most valuable insights emerge.

Perhaps the most important lesson of all concerns ownership. The danger facing founders today is rarely a shortage of visibility because social media has largely solved that problem. The danger is allowing other people to define the narrative before you do. Investors, journalists, competitors and algorithms are all enthusiastic storytellers, and not all of them feel any particular obligation to consult the protagonist before publishing the next chapter.

Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognisable people in history because she mastered the art of creating an unforgettable story. Her tragedy was not that she failed to build a powerful brand. It was that the brand eventually became more famous than the person behind it. Entrepreneurs can learn a great deal from that distinction because building a successful narrative is undoubtedly valuable, while retaining ownership of it may be even more important.

About Sarah Tucker

Sarah Tucker is a journalist, author and broadcaster whose work explores the intersection of culture, psychology, media, creativity and social change. She is the author of Love Laterally, the biography of Edward de Bono, creator of the concept of lateral thinking. Her work has appeared in national and international publications, and she regularly writes and speaks on creativity, perception, artificial intelligence, media and human behaviour.

For Encounters with Marilyn Monroe, Tucker contributed the chapter When Stars Fall, examining the significant rise in suicides following Monroe’s death and the lasting influence that event had on media reporting of suicide, celebrity and public responsibility.