As a former Tennesseean, this is a devistating loss. – Holly
Her efforts will be long remembered!
Thank you to production assistant Holly for recommending this episode! As a former Tennesseean, this topic was a must for her!
If you have the funds, please consider donating to The Imagination Library at https://imaginationlibrary.com/
SOURCES
https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2026/01/15/dolly-parton-nashville-hotel-business-empire-2026/87673044007/ (archive: https://archive.ph/AP75a)
https://www.foxnews.com/travel/dollywood-tops-disney-parks-best-amusement-park-rankings-survey
Picture sources:
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/remember-when-dolly-parton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_Wagoner
and Dolly’s official instagram.
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
We were having a staff meeting at RPG yesterday when the news broke that the legendary musician, actress, business tycoon and philanthropist Dolly Parton had passed away.
I’m sure you’ve heard about it by now – it was in all the papers! – and yes, it’s sad news indeed, both because it was unexpected and also because Dolly Parton is someone who, it seems, was that rare breed of rags to riches success who didn’t use her celebrity and wealth for self-indulgence, but who was actively looking for ways to make the world better for her family, her community and for her country.
And unlike a lot of wealthy people who just write a check or celebrities who lend or rent their persona to support those causes, Dolly Parton actually built a business empire and charitable giving foundations.
She’s left behind a business portfolio worth at least $450-650 million that includes over 30 businesses, licensing deals and other enterprises, including her Duncan Hines lines of baking mixes, Dolly Wines, her pet accessory company Doggy Parton, beauty products, fragrances, apparel products and of course her theme park and resorts company, which operates Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee as well as dinner shows that include Dolly Parton’s Stampede, Pirates Voyage and Hatfield & McCoy Dinner Feud as well as the family friendly Comedy Barn Theater, the Titanic Museum Attraction and an animatronic chicken-themed café.
Oh, and she also operated a very profitable media licensing business, a Hollywood production company called Sandollar Productions, a musical based on her life and a children’s book publisher and a museum slash hotel in downtown Nashville while still recording music and performing as a headliner.
And of course she’s long been an LGBTQ+ icon for her support of that community, devoted to people in need and the head of a children’s literary program through her Dollywood Foundation that’s distributed hundreds of millions of books to kids around the world.
All of this is built around the personal brand of a lady who hit it big as a country music star in the early 1970s, positioned herself as a larger-than-life persona but who also lived an carefully private life off stage, devoted to her husband, her extended family and her Eastern Tennessee community.
But here’s why I want to talk about Dolly Parton – her legacy has a lot to teach us not just about how to brand yourself – something she did better than just about anyone – but also how to do it without punching down, getting mired in politics or caving in to public pressure, because believe it or not, as popular and beloved as this lady was, she had to fight for a lot of what she accomplished, and perhaps her greatest trait was her confidence in herself to do what was in everyone’s best interests.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
OK, so full disclosure here – as much as I admire Dolly Parton and what she accomplished in life, I am not a Dolly Parton fan.
She was a tremendous musician and I’m certainly familiar with her music, but country music isn’t my thing.
I’ve never seen her in concert, I’ve never been to Dollywood, and I certainly am in the wrong target market for her branded products.
Aside from the 1980 movie 9 to 5, which is a good one and which marked her film debut as part of an ensemble cast, I really haven’t seen her in movies or TV shows aside from guest appearances.
Pretty much everything I know about her comes from that sort of cultural osmosis that happens with celebrities – you read about them in the news or magazines, you hear about the things they’re doing and you pick up little details here and there when their fans decide to tell you why you ought to know more about them.
In this case, that fan is my wife, who is into country music and who grew up aggravated that everyone around her believed one of Dolly Parton’s most famous and personally meaningful songs, “I Will Always Love You,” was by Whitney Houston for the 1992 movie The Bodyguard.
It was, of course, just a cover, and Dolly Parton reportedly had even denied Elvis Presley the rights to cover it because he wanted partial ownership of it. She made a fortune on it later on when Whitney’s version was a major hit, becoming the best-selling single by a female artist of all time. But it’d already been a successful song, twice hitting #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart and then hitting the top 20 again after Whitney Houston’s version repopularized it.
For many commercial musical artists, having just one song that could be that big of a hit would have been enough to pay for their permanent retirement.
For Dolly Parton, of course, it was just one of many major hits, and a sure sign that even when she was a young star, she had business savvy about keeping control of her creations and her brand.
And that brand was really interesting, built around a homegrown mythology of growing up poor on a tobacco farm in East Tennessee with a large family with an illiterate but intelligent father and a perpetually pregnant mother who also loved to sing. Dolly Parton – and that is her real name! – started performing as a child and found early success as a songwriter, but she actually had to fight her record label to get out of the bubblegum pop they wanted her to sing and to let her sing country music.
Her big break was with the country music star Porter Wagoner in 1967, who had her take over for the singer Norma Jean. After years of struggling to break through, Dolly finally had a hit with 1973’s “Jolene.” Her next big hit, 1974’s “I Will Always Love You,” was in response to her decision to leave Porter Wagoner behind professionally and go solo. Obviously, that worked out really well for her.
But it was her persona, as much as her musical talent, that made her such a visible star. She had enough of a showman’s instincts to realize she needed a distinctive look and presence so she’d be easily identified when she performed.
Patterning her big blonde wigs, big bust, larger than life feminine persona after what she described as a country girl’s idea of glamor – the town tramp – she used makeup and wigs and costumes and, at her own admission, frequent plastic surgery to match her outer persona to her charming and extroverted inner one.
She’s so associated with that bust that many things connected to womens’ breasts have been named after her, including Dolly the sheep, who was cloned from mammary cells.
At the same time, Dolly Parton was always careful to punch herself, not punch down, in how she presented herself. She might make jokes about looking like the town tramp, but it was because she admired that person, not because she was making fun of them.
Likewise, she joked that she’d participated in a Dolly Parton lookalike contest and lost – an old joke that goes all the way back to Charlie Chaplain – but in her case, it was a drag queen contest, and she presented this as good-natured fun. In fact, she always expressed a love and affinity for the LGBTQ+ side of society, which is one of the few political stances she ever took, and she stuck with it, even recently speaking out against anti-trans measures in Tennessee.
And that’s one of the lessons we can definitely take away from her personal brand – she centered herself on love and respect for other human beings and was very careful not to let her religious faith or her background in a more conservative country culture or her desire to protect her business holdings get in the way of speaking up for other people.
In fact, when her dinner stage show, Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, was criticized in 2018 for portraying a sanitized version of the US Civil War encouraging half of the audience to cheer for the gray side that represented the Confederacy, she listened, retooled the show into a less divisive theme and emphasized she was doing so because she wanted to be considerate of those who found the show offensive.
Here’s a direct quote from her, given to the publication Billboard at the time.
“When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede.’ As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumba—. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”
I want to emphasize for a moment – that is not how business is usually done.
What often happens is that brands dig in their heels, go through a public battle with their critics and then decide to either stick with the divisive theme and lose some of their audience, hoping their supporters will reward them with enthusiasm, or they refuse to change, pay a price for it and then have to retool or retire their brand.
Dolly Parton simply accepted the criticism, changed the show, and said she was doing it because she cared about her brand still being able to serve those who might be offended.
She also was smart enough to recognize that if she just fixed the problem and showed her good intentions to the people who wanted to attend her shows, her critics – some of whom may have just been looking for another culture war issue to ride in social media – wouldn’t have any power over her brand.
And again – not how business is usually done. The typical strategy is to ride out the storm and to make vague public statements and to take the wind out of critics’ sails before making any changes.
But to someone who’d built her brand around herself, Dolly Parton felt that just wasn’t an option because it wasn’t representative of who she was.
We could just stop there, because that alone is an amazing case study for marketers to learn from!
But let’s talk about another peculiar philosophy that Dolly Parton embraced, and that was using business to enrich and improve the lives of people in her community.
Dolly Parton’s original vision was to plunk her earnings into businesses that allowed her to offer products like cosmetics, wigs and lingerie to her fans – and I want to emphasize that this was a time when nobody was really doing this, especially female entertainers. Many of the companies serving female customers with these product lines were run almost exclusively by men and she recognized the niche for providing products designed for women by a woman who actually used them.
But her really smart business move was in 1986, when she entered a partnership with Herschend Family Enterprises to take the old Silver Dollar City in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee and transform it into a theme park called Dollywood.
Now, look, when I was growing up, Dollywood sounded like the corniest place on Earth. I long assumed it was just another celebrity vanity project from someone who really liked to license her name and likeness.
I was wrong. Dolly Parton has gone on record many times saying she wanted to invest in building a tourism industry for Eastern Tennessee to help create long-lasting jobs. Her investment help double the size of the park, greatly improve the rides and turned it into an award-winning park, both in terms of visitor popularity and in terms of the quality of the experience.
And I’m really not kidding about this – Dollywood is up there with Disney, Universal, Sea World and Legoland in terms of being one of the top theme park destinations in the world. Tripadvisor listed it as the best Theme Park in the United States last year based on user reviews, and #2 on that list was the Magic Kingdom at Disney World.
Now, there will obviously be another person quite like Dolly Parton. She is that rare example of a celebrity influencer who used her name and posterity for good, who used her wealth and status to advocate for treating everyone well, and who also gave back to her family, her community and the broader world far more than a song in her heart and a sparkle in her eye.
But let’s also mention her biggest legacy, which is the Dollywood Foundation, a charitable non-profit founded in 1988 and which focused its mission on supporting educational opportunities for children in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she’s originally from.
The crown jewel of this foundation is Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which gives enrolled kids a free book from birth until the age of five. It’s distributed over 330 million books since it was started in 1995.
Her foundation has also handed out scholarships, run programs to keep kids involved and active in school and shown positive growth in increasing school attendance rates and graduation rates.
Beyond that, she also set up the My People Fund in 2016 to directly benefit her community during the Great Smoky Wildfires and raised over $9 million from her own corporations and many corporate sponsors to directly help 900 displaced families.
Again, I cannot emphasize enough the power that a headlining entertainer brings to charitable works like this, but Dolly Parton’s drive to help the poorest and most vulnerable people in her part of the country – often overlooked, ignored and looked down upon – makes all of this incredibly remarkable.
If we as marketers allowed our desire to do good in the world to drive us first and then served out customers, communities and families with the same enthusiasm as Dolly Parton, we’d all be better off.
And so yes, the world is poorer for Dolly Parton’s departure from it yesterday. But her legacy is going to ensure as much more than a buxom blonde with a set of pipes.
She’ll be remembered as someone who stayed true to her convictions, who used her celebrity and wealth for bettering the world around her and whose brand was centered around an authentic, provable love for other people, no matter what their station in life.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
Leave a Reply