Oprah Winfrey’s brand has many years of life left in it yet
IT WAS one of the most tear-stained moments in the 24-year history of a show that specialises in tear-stained moments. On November 20th Oprah Winfrey announced that she will end her eponymous show in September 2011, 26 years after it first aired nationwide. She loves her show enough to know when it is time to say goodbye, she told her traumatised audience.这是24年的专注于打动人心的节目生涯中最令人热泪盈眶的时刻。11月20号，奥普拉.温芙蕾宣布将于2011年结束她的同名脱口秀节目。该节目已在全国广播了26年。奥普拉告诉极度愕然的听众，她很爱她的节目，因此知道什么时候该说再见。
The sound of ululation could be heard from sea to shining sea. For once the pundits sang the same song as “real Americans”—as one of Ms Winfrey’s recent guests, Sarah Palin, likes to call them. They talked breathlessly about Ms Winfrey’s up-from-the-bootstraps achievements—how she came from nothing to amass a fortune of $2.3 billion and how she has viewers in more than 100 countries—and pronounced her retirement the end of an era. The New York Times’s Gail Collins added that she wished politicians, from the 92-year-old Robert Byrd on down, would follow her example and quit while they are ahead.啜泣声从西海岸传到了东海岸。曾经，权威人士唱着同样的歌“真正的美国人”–如温芙蕾女士的最近一位嘉宾，莎拉.佩林就喜欢这样称呼。他们谈论着温芙蕾女士靠自身奋斗一步一步取得的成就–她是怎样从一无所有到聚集了23亿美元的财富，拥有100多个国家的观众–并宣告她的退役是一个时代的结束。纽约时报的盖尔.科林斯补充说她想从政，从92岁的罗伯特.伯德传下来，将以她为例，激流勇退。
The only problem with all this commentary is that Ms Winfrey is not quitting. She is ending her relationship with a big network, CBS, in order to devote herself to an ambitious new venture, a cable-television channel to be called the Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN, which she plans to launch in January 2011 as a joint-venture with Discovery Communications. The world is about to be blessed with more Oprah, rather than less. 关于这所有评论的唯一一个问题是，温芙蕾女士并不是退役。她正在结束与大网络CBS的合作，是为了让自己致身于抱负远大的新的尝试，被称为奥普莱.温芙蕾网络的有限电视频道，或OWN，这是她计划于2011年公布和“发现探索公司”合资的一览节目。世界即将有更多的奥普拉，而非更少。
This is a tricky transition that raises all sorts of questions about the power of personal brands. Can the star’s brand be separated from the show that has nurtured it for almost a quarter of a century? And can it be used to launch an entire network? Personal brands are easy to damage. Martha Stewart, who was once the nearest equivalent to Ms Winfrey, had started to devalue her brand even before she got into trouble with the law, spreading herself too thin and striking too many deals with retailers. The celebrities who lent their name to Planet Hollywood probably no longer relish being associated with a tacky fast-food chain that has gone bankrupt twice. “The Oprah Winfrey Show” is not just a “delivery channel” that she can close down at will: it has defined its creator for 24 years. By killing off her brand-creating show and diluting her personal contribution across an entire network, she runs the risk of enraging her fans.这是一个微妙的变化，出现各类关于个人品牌力量的问题。明星的品牌能与培养其几乎25年的节目分开吗？它能被用于投放整个网络吗？个人品牌很容易被破坏。玛莎·斯图尔特曾经是几乎与温芙蕾女士等同的人物，但甚至在她惹上法律纠纷之前就已使其品牌贬值了。过分铺张自己的品牌，与众多零售商签订交易，使得其品牌大为贬值。将自己的名字借给好莱坞星球的名人或许不再乐意与破产两次的寒酸的快餐链联系起来。“奥普拉.温芙蕾脱口秀”并不只是随她的意志就能关闭的 “输送频道”：它已塑造其创造者24年了。温芙蕾的离开是冒着激怒自己粉丝的危险，抹灭创造其个人品牌的脱口秀节目以及通过整个网络冲淡自己的个人贡献。
But there are good commercial reasons for Ms Winfrey’s decision. The audience for network television has been declining relentlessly as viewers have migrated to cable and the internet. The audience for “The Oprah Winfrey Show” has shrunk from about 14m viewers in 1998 to about 7m today, though it still remains the highest-rated talk show. Ms Winfrey is simply following her audience into a more fragmented media world. Besides, there is nothing to stop Ms Winfrey reviving “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, or something very like it, on her new platform.但是温芙蕾女士的决定有利好的商业因素。由于观众转向有限电视和网络，网络电视的听众在不断的减少。“奥普拉.温芙蕾脱口秀”节目的听众从1998年的 1400万缩减到如今大约700万，尽管其在脱口秀节目中，收视率仍占据最高。温芙蕾女士简单的跟随她的听众的步伐，进入更加零碎的媒体世界。此外，没有任何东西可以阻止温芙蕾女士复兴“奥普拉.温芙蕾脱口秀”，或在她的新的平台上与其非常相似的东西。
Ms Winfrey also has lots of experience at relaunching herself. She reinvented the daytime talk show not once but twice—first by exposing some of her innermost secrets in public (about how she was raped at the age of nine and experimented with drugs in her 20s, for example) and second by taking her show upmarket. While Jerry Springer and his ilk filled their studios with stump-toothed degenerates, Ms Winfrey introduced her book club and encouraged her viewers to improve themselves.温芙蕾女士也有很多重新推出自己的经验。她重新创新了日间脱口秀不是一次，而是两次–第一次是在公众面前揭露自己的一些内心秘密（例如有关她九岁时怎样被强奸，20多岁时曾吸毒），第二次是谈论她的脱口秀高档。当杰瑞·斯普林格…………………….温芙蕾女士引进了读书俱乐部并鼓励她的观众提升自己。
Ms Winfrey is also an experienced brand-stretcher. She has starred in a number of successful films, most notably “The Colour Purple”, for which she was nominated for an Oscar; more importantly, she has launched a succession of Oprah-related products such as her website, Oprah.com and her magazine, O. Each time she succeeded in extending her audience without alienating her most loyal fans: a year after O’s launch in 2000 half its readers were not regular watchers of “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, including many professional women who would never dream of watching television in the afternoon.温芙蕾女士也经历了品牌拓展。她在一系列成功的电影中担任主角，最出名的是“紫色”，并被提名为奥斯卡奖；最重要的是，她发布了一系列与奥普拉有关的产品，诸如她的网页Oprah.com，她的杂志O. 每次她都成功扩展了自己的听众，而没疏远自己的最忠实的粉丝：2000年，O杂志发行一年后，其读者不再是“奥普拉.温芙蕾脱口秀”的固定观众，包括很多从没想象到自己会在下午看电视的职业女性。
Life without Oprah没有奥普拉的生活The biggest challenge with the cable channel will be to see whether Oprah’s brand can survive independently from the star herself. But again she has experience here. She has produced several films that deal with the classic Oprah-themes of suffering and redemption in which she did not actually appear. But the best evidence that she can make successful programmes without starring in them is her success in launching Phil McGraw. She first encountered him after she said on air that fears of mad-cow disease had put her off hamburgers; he helped her handle a lawsuit from a group of enraged Texas cattlemen. She invited him onto her show several times, and then helped him get his own program. “Dr Phil” is now the second most popular talk-show host after Ms Winfrey herself.对有线电视的最大挑战就是看奥普拉品牌是否能不依靠明星自己生存下去。再一次，温芙蕾尝试了有线电视。她创作了几部电影，涉及典型的有关受难和救赎的奥普拉主题，而她本人并没哟出现在电影中。但是最能证明她能不用出任主演就能制作成功节目的是她成功激励了菲尔·麦克格劳博士。温芙蕾是在广播中说害怕疯牛病夺去自己的汉堡遭到愤怒的牛肉场主控诉时，首次遇见了菲尔·麦克格劳博士。他帮她摆平了这起控诉。温芙蕾几次邀请他到脱口秀节目，而后帮他获得了他自己的节目。“Dr Phil”是继温芙蕾女士之后的第二个最有名的脱口秀主持人。
Ms Winfrey has always been a vigilant steward of her brand. Almost from the first she wrested as much control as possible from the suits at CBS—and struck famously savvy deals into the bargain. This entailed not only creating her own company, Harpo, but also her own production studio. She is also notorious for her overbearing perfectionism. Ms Winfrey has steadfastly refused to take her company public, as Ms Stewart did. She has also refused to strike deals with retailers or stick her name on merchandise, as numerous celebrity chefs and athletes have done.温芙蕾女士一向对自己的品牌管理警醒。几乎从一开始，她就要求得到CBS的更多的自由掌控权。这包括不仅是创造了她自己的公司Harpo，而且包括她自己的制作工作室。她也因其傲慢的十全十美主义而臭名昭著。温芙蕾女士坚决拒绝让自己的公司上市，和斯图尔特一样。她也拒绝与零售商达成交易或将自己的名字贴在商品上，就如许多名厨和运动员所做的。
Such vigilance about her brand is hardly a guarantee of success in the volatile and cacophonous media market. Her film version of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” earned only $23m, less than half what it cost to make. Her earlier tentative venture into the cable market, with Oxygen Media, enjoyed limited success. But Ms Winfrey’s handful of failures are as nothing compared with her successes. Perhaps more than any of her rivals Ms Winfrey understands that it is hard to fail in the media business if you put your faith in people’s appetite for stories of those who pick themselves up from the floor and make something of their lives.她对自己品牌如此的警惕，很难保证在动荡噪杂的媒体市场取得成功。她的托妮·莫里森版本的电影“被爱”仅赚取2300万美元，比其成本的一半还少。她早期尝试与氧气媒体合作进入有线市场，享受着有限的成功。但温芙蕾女士少数的失败与成功相比，是微不足道的。或许温芙蕾女士比她的任何一个竞争对手都明白，如果你将信念对中人们的胃口，讲述这些从地上爬起来的人们和在自己生活中有所得人的故事，就很难在媒体业务中失败。
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