Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has taught us a BILLION DOLLAR Masterclass on the key elements of brand building: Know Your Audience, Own Your Brand, Craft Powerful Stories, and Embrace Continual Evolution.
The Eras Tour sold more than $1 billion of tickets, while having a broader economic impact exceeding $10 billion. And those numbers don’t even include sales on Taylor’s webstore, which has generated (so far) between $150 million and $300 million (WSJ.com).
Put another way, no concert tour in history has been more of a global economic juggernaut.
There are many simple, yet wildly impactful, lessons from Taylor Swift’s success that today’s brands can apply to their own strategies. Here are a few that we believe are the most imperative:
Know Your Audience.
While Taylor’s primary audience is Millennial and Gen Z women, a 2023 Morning Consult survey revealed that, among “avid fans” (the most committed 16%), women make up just over half (at 52%) and men make up fully 48%.
Taylor’s fans have a deeply emotional connection to her brand on multiple levels – her wardrobe choices, her empowered lifestyle, her love for her cats, and especially her lyrics, through which she shares her feelings in a way that is rare in its depth.
With that in mind, Taylor has made clear over the years that the broad extent of her reach is because she connects with fans based on what they feel as people rather than the demographic boxes they check. Her brand, then, is as strongly tied to the emotions people associate with it as it is to her music itself.
Own Your Brand.
For many years, Taylor has worked tirelessly to regain ownership control of her work. Since she owns the musical composition copyrights to her songs, she was able to re-record earlier works as “Taylor’s Version” while also changing record labels to gain 100% creative freedom over her decisions related to launching and creating new music.
Applied to brands, “Own Your Brand” translates to strategies such as utilizing direct-to-consumer channels, loyalty programs, creative launches, and experiential activations, all of which allow greater control over how customers experience and relate to the brand.
Craft Powerful Stories.
When it comes to storytelling, Taylor Swift is one of the best of our time. As Time noted in choosing her as Person of the Year, “…she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique – a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story.”
But it’s not just Taylor’s masterful use of channels to share her message; it is the stories she creates through her lyrics and posts that really touch her audience. How else does an artist re-release a 10-minute version of a breakup song and have it go straight to #1 on the charts?
The world’s most influential brands owe at least as much of their success to the stories they craft as they do to the products they make. An executive at Nike once said, “The secret sauce at Nike is how we transform great products into ‘must-haves’ through the magic of storytelling.”
Embrace Continual Evolution.
In 2012, Taylor released her fourth studio album, Red, which expanded her musical repertoire beyond her country roots by embracing the pop genre. With this creative evolution, her fanbase grew and she has not missed a beat since. Each album Taylor releases captures a new sound for a new era of her life.
Brands who not only accept but actively pursue this mentality of continual evolution thrive and stay relevant with consumers. Just look at Coca-Cola: this year marks 138 years since the first one was poured. Over the decades, the brand has embraced the necessity of brand evolution through new packaging, line extensions, market expansions, and creative campaigns to stay relevant.
At Quantum Leap Insights, we’re passionate about brand strategy and would love to chat more about whatever challenges your brand is facing this year.