Taking Control of Your Brand the Taylor Swift Way
How one of the most powerful personal brands got even bigger
Billboard recently honoured Taylor Swift with the Woman of the Decade award. In her acceptance speech, she described her journey of all the times she has had to change her brand to keep up with her critics and maybe her audience as well. From being forced to being the only songwriter on her third album, Speak Now, to reducing her dating, to having too much country music and shifting her whole genre to pop in the album 1989, to removing herself from the public eye, to becoming a villain and releasing a snake-filled album, Reputation, that completely changed the narrative.
I am not ashamed to say it, I am a major Swiftie. I mean, “Love Story” was everybody’s jam at one point in time (don’t lie, you millennial). See, now I’m sitting here, watching Taylor Swift’s Netflix Reputation Concert for the tenth time, and all I can think about is what a great performer and singer she is — which is what an artist should be known for.
But that is not the only thing that makes Taylor Swift a worldwide phenomenon. Taylor Swift was able to take control of her brand at the right time, which many people and, more importantly, companies haven’t gotten right. Her brand voice has able to grow powerful because she uses some of the most mainstream marketing concepts and makes them her lynchpin.
Social Media Is Her End Game
When it comes to the power of social media, Taylor Swift understands every bit of it. How it works, how people interact, what excites people on different platforms — every step is well planned, which has got her 124 million Instagram followers and 71 million Facebook likes. I mean, of course, it’s normal that everyone has a social media plan, but Taylor truly uses it to her advantage.
She’s a hardcore fan of suspense through social media. Taylor Swift is known for dropping clues all over her social media accounts — simple things like putting in seven palm trees, putting photos of a surprise mural for her song. She’s leveraging the power in the best possible way.
How did social media allow Taylor Swift to rebrand herself? Her PR team and she used the concept of a social media blackout where she unfollowed everyone, deleted all her old posts — clean slate completely. It caught the attention of fans. They believed (and were right) that Taylor was finally releasing new music after three years, especially after she went incognito on social media. In fact, the hashtag #TS6IsComing had generated more than 200,000 tweets. She even disabled her comments to show how serious she was about being in control of her own story.
Taylurking: ORM and Brand Loyalty
Taylor Swift loves her fans and how much her fans love her. She stalks them so much to see what they’re posting about her and her music. This made her come up with her own term for it: Taylurking. She goes through people’s posts to understand what they think of her music and to show some extra love. Many times people see her comments popping up on their Instagram Live, especially if they are fan pages.
The people she stalks are either sent gifts or, more importantly, invited for secret sessions that involve Taylor playing new songs to her most dedicated fans. This always leads to some conversations on social media, which obviously leads to some positive talks about her. With TS ready to reward her loyal fans, they continue to post about her and her music, hoping to get her attention.
Brand loyalty only increases when it comes to all the clues she leaves around. Everyone is always ready and waiting to count the number of holes in the fences, hoping to discover a countdown to the next album.
Let’s not forget the loyalty they show when someone insults Taylor. I mean, hell hath no fury like a Swiftie scorned.
Custom Taylor-ed Content
With such a large fan following, with each fan speculating what Taylor is going to do next, she understands the importance of how good her content is. It is always structured to play around how her fans want more.
When she dropped clues for her new album Lover, she posted pictures of individual random items that are in tune with the aesthetics of the album. When you open her social media profile, you also see that Taylor has a different aesthetic for her albums, so her content is designed in a very specific way. Fans even understood her new album’s vibe from the aesthetic of her posts.
For an artist, the most intimate way to connect with their fans is through the music. Taylor takes this a step further with Behind the Scenes on Instagram. She wrote and produced her new song “Christmas Tree Farm” in the span of two days, and she documented everything, which she posted on Instagram. This is her process with many of her other songs. Let’s not forget her iconic music videos — “Look What You Made Me Do” was a case where she took content to another level of connecting all her eras, which fans went crazy for.
Gorgeous Experiences
Like I said before, Taylor Swift is a brilliant performer, and she understands that concerts are another product she offers, which is why the experience at the concert is phenomenal. While watching her Reputation Tour on Netflix, you see how she interacts with her audience, offering not just shoe-tapping songs but also a storyline that everyone is able to understand because she explains it through her own narration. She makes sure that she plays all her hits, even the old ones, because she knows how much it means to them. Taking the case of “All Too Well,” she has mentioned before how fans have been able to make her love the song, which is why she must always play it for them.
While making sure she gives the fans what they want, through Taylurking, she found out that in one of her hits, “Delicate,” many fans added their own twist of adding “1, 2, 3, Let’s go bitch!’ right before the verse starts. And Taylor being Taylor, she has started to mouth the chant in cohesion with the whole stadium screaming it.
There are many ways in which Taylor and her team try to personalize all her tours. In the Rep tour, each attendee was given an LED bracelet so they could wear it and wave their hands. That way, as Taylor said, “I can see each one of you dancing all the way to the back.” Even though the tour was set to become a failure, it broke the record, becoming the highest-grossing U.S. tour, all thanks to the stage set by Taylor Swift and her team.
She’s the Man of Values
One of the main things a strong brand can do is stand for the values they believe in, and that is extremely true for Taylor Swift. From using her voice and music to support the LGBTQ community to standing against sexual harassment through her $1 lawsuit to standing up for her music against other record labels and managers — she has been true to the values close to her.
Taylor continues to show her personality through her social media. She makes herself relatable and vulnerable through her posts and songs, allowing fans to understand another personal side of her. Take the snake debacle, where Kanye West and Kim Kardashian basically recorded her phone conversation with Kanye, in which he takes her approval for certain lyrics that she deemed offensive. Suddenly, she was called out as someone who was a snake and was always victimized, receiving a lot of negative ORM, even though she didn’t get the whole story from Kanye and the recording released was edited.
Now her brand value fell thanks to the masses bullying her. After three years, she took control of her own narrative and took a stand against bullying through her story of Reputation. “If someone is using name-calling to bully you on social media, and even if a lot of people jump on board with it — it doesn’t have to defeat you. It can strengthen you instead.” Fans feel a stronger connection to her when she shows what is true to her.
Being a part of the younger generation, she knows that she has to keep up with the time. Even though many artists have been anti-streaming, Taylor was extremely vocal about it through her To Apple, Love Taylor letter, which led to such a social media frenzy that the company had to pay royalties to artists even in the three-month free trial period. She stood for what she believes in and is still able to maintain a strong relationship with Apple Music.
Rebranding Is Why She Can Have Nice Things
“With the death of her reputation, she truly felt alive.” These were the words that echoed during her Reputation tour. These words allowed Taylor Swift to take back the reins of what the media was saying about her, how people were bullying her, and how she just had to disappear. In that disappearance, she went completely incognito. She didn’t release any music and when she did, she and her team made sure she had the best strategy in place to rebrand herself into a much stronger artist because she knew it was a necessary step.
While Reputation was all about things she doesn’t care about anymore, her new album, Lover, is all about the things she does care about, which is why she will be taking a different approach to her touring for Lover Fest.
All these steps have led to Taylor Swift breaking records: winning the most American Music Awards in history, most simultaneous entries in Billboard’s Top 100 by any woman in history, first female to ever win a Grammy for winning Album of the Year twice, highest female and solo 24-hour debut for any music video on Youtube, highest-paid celebrity of 2019, and many, many more.
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Taylor Swift learns, innovates, listens to her customers — she gets all gold stars in every marketing aspect there is. In the end, she makes sure her product, i.e. her songs, never let the consumers down, making her the King of my Heart.