What Marketers Can Learn from Taylor Swift’s Stratospheric Success
Taylor Swift has developed an enviable mega brand that’s built on four solid business principles, says an analysis in the Harvard Business Review, and every marketer can learn a thing or two by studying these strategies.
According to author Kevin Evers, a senior editor at HBR, Swift’s success can be broken down into four behaviors: targeting untapped markets, finding opportunities to create stickiness, maintaining productive paranoia, and adapting to radical shifts in platforms.
Why it matters
Taylor Swift has herself said that she never set out to be some sort of innovative genius. Lucky for her, she had good instincts. But while Swift’s success might only come once in a generation, the business fundamentals that gave rise to her brand can be replicated more often.
Four strategies for Swift-like success
1. Target untapped markets
When Swift started her career, she was told that the audience for country music was 35-year-old housewives. As a teenager who loved country music herself, she believed this was wrong. So she defied experts and started making the music she wanted to listen to.
Instead of focusing on the obstacles, she unwittingly found a completely untapped market. While not every marketer will be able to have her remarkable timing, the same lesson applies: look for the “blue ocean” – one that’s open and wide – instead of the “red ocean” where everyone is fighting over the same set of customers.
2. Create stickiness
Customer retention is one of the fundamentals of marketing. Once you have a base of customers, the trick becomes keeping them. Swift leaned into the internet era at a time when it was making music cheaper and easier to discover. And she did this by giving her fan base a reason to stay engaged with her music – her lyrics.
The lyrics were intended to “create intrigue for her audience”, notes Evers. “It gave rise to an internet community” – what marketers now understand as a Fandom – “that would debate meaning endlessly online.” This kept them coming back for more, something which Swift rewarded and encouraged.
Read more about the value of “emotional stickiness” in our latest guide on customer retention strategies.
3. Maintain productive paranoia
Those leaders who are always highly alert to potential negative developments are said to have “productive paranoia”, according to leadership experts Jim Collins and Morten Hansen.
Swift channeled her fear into creative pivots that included artistic collaborations which were deemed risky. One of these was with Swedish producer Max Martin, known for creating hits for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. While it disrupted what initially drew fans to her music, it also helped to keep fans interested.
Collaborations can be tricky to pull off but can widen an audience through innovation. For a recent example, read how Nike is looking to reinvent itself with women with its partnership with Skims.
4. Adapt to radical shifts in platforms
No business survives without recognizing that things change. It’s those who anticipate change and adapt to it fastest which survive the longest. And even those brands you think might be around forever can get it wrong. Just look at the tale of Tupperware.
Swift adapted quickly to the streaming era by releasing albums faster. In only 15 months, she released 52 album tracks, a rate that put her at the top of Spotify’s algorithm. The artist also started rerecording old songs, which opened up a new way of using her hugely popular back catalogue. “It’s difficult to overstate how effective this has been,” says Evers.
Key quote
“Over the years Swift has displayed such a remarkable ability to innovate—and to make sophisticated strategy and marketing moves—that it’s worth trying to draw lessons from her career, the same way we study traditional business visionaries such as Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos” – Kevin Evers, senior editor, Harvard Business Review, and author of There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift.
Credit: HBR, WARC