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Taylor Swift, CMO

/ emgutknecht / 1 Comment
Swift on the cover of Time Magazine, November 2014

Swift on the cover of Time Magazine, November 2014

In high school I loved Taylor Swift; I even went to one of her concerts. A huge country fan, over time I began to resent Swift’s gradual shift over to the poppy side of the music world. 1989 changed everything. She does whatever she wants and doesn’t care what she looks like doing it (Read: Taylor dancing in Shake it Off music video)

I like Taylor Swift now, and I’m over it. She’s done what she wants to do, and she hasn’t apologized for it along the way. Not only is she a great writer and singer, she is a brilliant marketer. At 25 she has more marketing tricks up her sleeve than most seasoned professionals.

First, she has managed to re-brand herself from a country princess to a pop queen, and she has managed to do it without burning any bridges in the music community. She did it slowly, over time as each of her albums became progressively less country and more poppy. Her music is so good though that singers (and fans alike) from both generes love her and have continued to follow her career and her music as she bridged the gap. Influencers are important for any brand and it’s even better when your influencers are authentic and enthusiastic supporters of your brand.

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Engagement with customers, or in this case, fans, is something that a lot of brands struggle with. Taylor Swift is amazing at it and I think that is one of her greatest strengths. She’s truly interacting and engaging in the lives of these fans. She knows who they are. She’ll both talk to them and listen to them. This winter she got in the holiday spirit with Swiftmas in which she unapologetically stalked her fans on social media to find out about their lives to she could hand pick Christmas gifts for them. The rational side of me wants to think that she had one of her many assistants do the actual cyber stalking but Taylor still handwrote letters along with the gifts to each of her fans. She also recently sent a fan a check for $1989 to help with the fans’ student loans. Seriously. She actually went out of her way to do these small things for fans. I have never heard of another artist/actress/politician, anyone famous doing things like this. Doing things like these coupled with never being involved in any type of scandal has endeared Taylor to millions of fans across the world.

She also knows exactly what her fans want and caters to that. This is a quality that many brands lack. Apple is one of the few brands that seriously knows their fans and works tirelessly to come up with products that they will like. Swift released her first album when she was just 16. Her most recent album release, 1989 was just shy of her 25th birthday. Swift’s fans have grown up with her through her five albums. Her debut album featured angsty teenager songs such as Teardrops On My Guitar and Picture to Burn. Known for writing her songs almost entirely by herself, Swift, a teenager herself when her second album was released in 2008, is able to tap into the spirit of the average teenager and write songs that speak to them. The album’s most popular song You Belong with Me was about a nerdy high school girl who ultimately ends up with the hero football player. With the releases of Speak Now and Red Swift, now a snarky twenty something took to mocking her exes in her songs – something that all twenty something women love to do. She has gained a lot of notoriety for those stunts but I think her writing songs like that has done a fantastic job of generating her great PR as the media (and America) tries to guess which song is about which former fling as well as allowed her to differentiate herself from every other pop star out there. Finally, with 1989 Swift has really come into her own skin and flawlessly made the leap from Country to being firmly ingrained in the pop music world. Instead of hating on her exes, in this album Swift makes fun of herself and more importantly has fun with it. Swift has been described as a “serial dater” which she fully owns and dramatizes in Blank Space.

As a marketer I have come to really respect Swift first for her perfect rebrand of herself and also because she’s just really awesome at marketing herself and her products. I’m excited to see what new and innovative thing she comes up with next..

2015 Marketing Resolutions

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2014 was a big year for marketing — the desktop computer continued to lose major ground to mobile devices, wearable tech caught on, and crowd sourcing was huge. 2015 is sure to have major gains in the field as well. Here are some of my predictions:

  • Instagram: With over 200 million users this app should be marketing central for any company looking to engage with their customers/clients and most importantly potential customers and clients. Instagram is a fantastic platform to share images of pretty much anything and many companies have not figured that out yet. It is a tool that any small business looking for growth needs to master. I predict that in 2015 we will be seeing a lot more of the promoted pictures popping up in our feed as well as many more companies making the leap to get an Instagram in the first place.

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  • Social payments: Here, I’m talking about both one click purchase capability from sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and especially Pinterest but also peer-peer payments like venmo and more recently, Snapcash. While everyone in my peer group is wary of Snapcash I think as long as companies educated the consumers a little better than a 10 second video, payment systems like this could really take off.
  • Geo-fencing: I think geo-fencing and geo-targeting are really cool concepts and I hope they take off in 2015. While getting promotions into the hands of consumers is the top use of this technology it can also be a powerful tool simply for educating people. For instance, I could be the local high school running a fundraiser at the town’s chipotle. I could put a geo-fence around the largest local employer and send a text to everyone there letting them know about the fundraiser. With something like a fundraiser their success depends on awareness so this would be a great tool to educate people about all kinds of things.
  • Content is King: Shout-Out to Drake for drilling it into my head the last four years that Content is king. This is a concept that not all companies know, but more and more have been warming up to the idea and I think in 2015 the number of companies producing good, native content is going to rise at exponential levels. Everyone can have a huge sale or donate a bunch of money to a local shelter to generate some good PR, but not everyone is capable of producing good, engaging content. In this day and age content is one of the few things that companies can use to differentiate themselves from the competition. I predict in the next year companies will seriously step up their game and make creating original content (owned media) a larger part of their marketing budget. The Oreo Super bowl tweet a couple years ago is a brilliant example of this – it was original, it was timely and it was a hit.

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What do you think will happen in the world of marketing in 2015?