In March 2009, Taylor Swift played to a crowd of 900 fans in Melbourne. Fast forward 15 years, Taylor completed the Melbourne performances from the Australian leg of ‘The Eras Tour’, performing to over 96, 000 fans per night.
Nominated Time’s 2023 Person of the Year, Taylor Swift’s success has been compared to the likes of The Beatles and Elvis. Australia has been gripped by Swiftmania with tickets for her Sydney and Melbourne shows selling out near-instantly. The tour has added over half a BILLION dollarsto the Aussie economy, according to the RMIT university.
How has Taylor become global phenomenon, reaching unprecedented levels of stardom?
We believe it’s about how she communicates. Here we break down some of the marketing and communication strategies she has adopted – intentionally or not – to reach universal popularity.
Encouraging interaction
Taylor Swift’s performances are synonymous with exchanging handmade friendship bracelets amongst fans (and with Taylor) and with organised audience chants.
The bracelet trend started in October 2022 and solidified into a global tradition throughout ‘The Eras Tour’. Fans invest time and care to make the bracelets, boosting IRL interaction with other fans and making concert attendance an even more significant, memorable life event.
Another consistent fan-made tradition throughout the Eras Tour is shouting specific phrases during live performances. These chants have become unspoken rules, adding call and response catchcries to secure even more loyalty from Swifties.
Satisfying the appetite for novelty
When Taylor rerecorded her albums ‘Fearless’, ‘Red’, ‘Speak Now’ and ‘1989’, she included unreleased music, ‘From the Vault’.
The inclusion of new music from each album era provided fans the opportunity to relive the nostalgia of her past albums. This forged an even stronger bond with fans by providing insights into her deep, personal experiences at the time of writing the album.
Gamification
To celebrate the release of ‘1989’, Taylor released a vault themed puzzle that appeared when ‘Taylor Swift’ was googled. Upon completion of the puzzle, a graphic appeared noting that if 33 million people decoded the puzzle, the virtual vault would open.
Fans flooded in to complete the challenge, unlocking the vault in just a few hours. This revealed prerecorded voice message from Taylor and the tiles of four of her new songs ‘From the Vault’.
The sheer mass of Swifties participating in the Vault puzzle led to Google crashing. Google responded to the crash tweeting “Swifties, the vault is jammed! But don’t worry, there are no blank spaces inside… We’re in our fix-it era and will be out of the woods soon.”
This gamification of her album release, combined with further personalised content, had fans more invested with Swift than ever before.
Omnichannel approaches
With ‘The Eras Tour’, ‘The Eras Tour’ Netflix Special, the ‘Miss Americana’ documentary, web content, a huge social media following and 14 albums, it’s hard to find a communication channel Taylor Swift isn’t on.
This omnichannel approach means Taylor reaches more of her audience in more places, providing multiple touchpoints and bringing her content to wherever her fans are.
Cultural references
Taylor has been known to insert phrases into her live performances that acknowledge and celebrate the city she performs in. Taylor demonstrated this in her recent Melbourne show by sneaking in some Aussie slang.
After speaking the lyrics: “So, you know that we are never getting back together,” she passed the mic to a backup dancer who said “yeah, nah”.
By customising each performance, she caters to her local audience and increases the sense of novelty, making every show a unique and must see experience.
It’s no surprise that Taylor has managed to connect with her fans to reach hyper-stardom in a way that few modern artists have managed.
While we can’t expect to match Taylor’s meteoric success, her strategies can be applied to your marketing and communication efforts to increase their success.
