Picture this: You’ve flown halfway across the world. You’ve spent months making a sequined costume. You’ve practiced trading friendship bracelets. Then the concert gets cancelled.
What do you do?
If you’re a Swifty, you go anyway. You gather with 40,000 other fans in the streets of Vienna. You sing for three hours. You create your own concert.
This actually happened when a terrorist threat forced Taylor Swift to cancel her Vienna shows. Behavioural scientist Ken Hughes describes it as “the moment I realized.” He thought, “Oh my god, the wheel is turning and Taylor has taken herself away.”
What he witnessed wasn’t just passionate fandom. It was the culmination of a 20-year strategy that every brand should study which he enumerates in his book, “Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection”
The 4% Problem That Became a 100% Solution
Only 4% of people who wanted Eras Tour tickets actually got them. That left 96% outside the stadium. Most artists would see this as a problem. Swift saw it as an opportunity.
“You watch 20,000, 30,000 people outside the stadium all coming together singing for three and a half hours,” Hughes describes. “Just because they couldn’t be inside wasn’t going to stop them coming together as a community.”
This isn’t normal consumer behavioUr. You don’t see this with other products. When the iPhone sells out, disappointed customers don’t gather outside Apple stores to admire each other’s Android phones.
So what’s different?
The Half-Your-Time Rule That Changed Everything
At 15 years old, sitting in her bedroom, Swift understood something most artists miss. Hughes explains her thinking: “Half your time you could spend writing the material, but the other half your time you had to spend on MySpace and Bebo and Tumblr talking to fans.”
This wasn’t occasional engagement. This was “10 or 15 years every night, every week… always inviting the fan back into her world. Sometimes, she would step into their world and turn up at their houses as a surprise.”
The activities included:
- Friendship bracelet exchanges
- Easter egg hunts in lyrics and videos
- Gamification of album releases
- Personal replies to fan messages
- Surprise home visits
- Invitation to secret listening sessions
“It was all a game. It was all a community. It was all family,” Hughes notes.
Most brands treat customer engagement as a marketing tactic. Swift treated it as half her job.
Two Words That Explain Everything: Authenticity and Vulnerability
Why do people connect with Swift differently than with Madonna, Lady Gaga, or Rihanna?
Hughes identifies two core brand values: “Authenticity and vulnerability. And they’re very powerful brand values today. Gen Alpha and Gen Z consider these values essential. They are core reasons for inviting a brand into their lives.”
The authenticity manifests in specific ways:
- Showing herself getting dance moves wrong
- Revealing the messy process of songwriting
- Sharing behind-the-scenes footage of video production
- Opening up about breakups and relationships
- Letting fans see her actual personality
“She has never kind of faked who she is,” Hughes observes. “She will make videos of herself learning the dance in the video and she’ll show all the behind-the-scenes footage of all getting it wrong and how stupid she is and falling over because that’s the human side of it.”
Compare this to traditional pop stars of the 1980s and 1990s. “It was all about fame and glitz and glamour,” Hughes says. Swift does glamour too but never loses the human element.
The result? “Everyone thinks, ‘Yeah, she’s just like me and she talks just like me.’”
The Strategic Mind Behind the “Manipulative” Accusation
Swift has delivered a powerful speech about gender double standards in business. As Hughes recounts: “If a man as a male entrepreneur, if you are doing things, keeping track of everything and reacting, you’re called strategic. And if women do it, they’re called manipulative.”
Her strategic brilliance is evident in multiple decisions:
The Direct-to-Consumer Revolution When releasing the Eras Tour movie, Swift bypassed Hollywood entirely. “She didn’t hire a Hollywood movie studio to make the movie… She didn’t hire a distributor to distribute the movie. She sold it direct to cinemas.”
This was revolutionary. “One of the first times a movie of that size was ever sold direct to cinemas. She cut out the studio. She cut out the distributor. She gave the cinema more money and took more money herself.”
The benefits were clear:
- Higher profit margins
- Complete creative control
- Faster time to market
- Direct relationship with venues
The Platform Strategy Her latest album announcement broke with tradition. “She announced her new album drop on a podcast. She didn’t announce it on a radio station. She didn’t announce it on a TV station. She didn’t even announce it on social media.”
Why? “She now knows the authentic personal nature of the podcast.” Using her fiance’s podcast created intimacy at scale. “That one-hour podcast was watched by hundreds of millions of people globally.”
The Re-recording Campaign When her masters were sold without her consent, Swift didn’t just complain. She re-recorded her entire back catalogue. This brought “old product to new consumers” and demonstrated that artists can own their creative output.
The Numbers That Prove the Strategy Works
Swift’s latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” achieved unprecedented success:
- Fastest-selling album of all time
- More first-week sales than any album in history
- Top 12 positions on the Billboard 200 simultaneously
- Multiple records broken
Hughes emphasizes: “She breaks her own records now at this stage. So she’s a machine.”
But the real metrics aren’t sales. They’re behavioral:
- Fans spending months creating costumes
- Strangers bonding over friendship bracelets
- Multiple generations attending together
- People getting Swift-themed tattoos
- 40,000 gathering for a cancelled concert
The Heartbreak of Scale: When Intimacy Dies
There’s a problem with Swift’s current brand, and Hughes doesn’t shy away from it.
“The core of the brand has been built on the intimacy of the person and she’s lost that now with scale,” he observes. “Now most of her communications on her social channels are buy this thing, buy this thing, look at this thing.”
The shift is noticeable: “When she was younger, she would let you inside her family, her breakups, her mind… She doesn’t do that anymore because she got burnt by it.”
The consequences of constant visibility are brutal. “The moment she puts out her face into public space, she has to be on. She has to be Taylor. And if she makes one bad facial expression, one bad comment, it’s all over social media.”
Hughes has met many famous people in his work. His conclusion? “I’m yet to meet anyone famous who enjoys fame. They enjoy it for maybe the first year because it’s exciting… After that they all hate it.”
The Vienna Revelation: When the Product Disappears
The cancelled Vienna concerts created an unexpected moment of clarity.
After discovering a terrorist plot, Swift made the courageous decision to cancel. “Nothing is more important than safety,” Hughes explains. “So they cancelled all the concerts.”
What happened next revealed the true nature of her brand.
“There was 120,000 people crying and this was the most biggest thing that was going to happen in their year… They took to the streets and they had their own Taylor Swift party.”
Tens of thousands gathered to sing together. “That was the moment I realized, oh my god, Taylor Swift has removed the product. She’s taken away the product and the fan, the customer, have created their own product.”
This is the ultimate branding achievement: “If Taylor has taken the product away, then what is the product? Like if you can remove Taylor and the product is still Taylor, then she’s not even the brand anymore. She has transcended branding.”
At this point, Hughes argues, the fans are the brand. “The Swifties, the collective, is the brand. The brand is joy. The brand is community. The brand is shared story, belonging.”
What Your Brand Should Actually Do About This
The lessons apply across industries. Hughes shares examples from healthcare to illustrate.
Create Moments That Matter A nurse noticed an elderly patient was nervous before surgery. She spent five extra minutes talking with him. She learned he loved fishing. She brought him a fishing magazine the next day.
“His face lit up like a child at Christmas,” Hughes recalls. The patient’s satisfaction survey mentioned nothing except “this wonderful lady who made him feel seen, heard, valued.”
Lead from the Front A hospital CEO puts on a plastic apron and delivers meals to patients when he visits. Why?
“If the CEO has the time to take off his jacket and his tie and spend five minutes with hundreds of patients… then the next memo they get from the CEO asking them to do it, they think, ‘Well, our CEO does it, so I can do it, too.’”
Build Customer Intimacy, Not Just Experience Hughes distinguishes between one-off experiences and deeper connection. “Intimacy is defined as a sense of closeness, developing a sense of closeness with somebody.”
Customer loyalty isn’t about punch cards. “Loyalty is an emotive psychological state with oxytocin being released from bonding, with serotonin, with dopamine.”
Invest in Your People “You will never deliver amazing customer experience unless you have amazing employee experience,” Hughes insists. “Unless the people who you have recruited, who you have trained, who you have inspired believe in connection.”
The Tattoo Test: The Ultimate Measure of Brand Success
Hughes met a snowboarder with a huge Red Bull tattoo across his neck. The placement was deliberate.
“He branded himself with this brand… What he is saying to you is this is my tribe. I am danger. I am adventure. I am adrenaline. I am at the edge.”
This raises the ultimate branding question: “How did Red Bull get there?”
Through consistency. “They did it by consistently sponsoring events at the edge, consistently seeking out people who lived their lives that way.”
Red Bull didn’t sponsor safe sports or safe people. “They only want the misfits, the crazy people.”
The same principle applies to Swift. Her fans get tattoos of her lyrics and album covers. “The idea that you permanently mark the only body that you have with a commercial brand is the ultimate test of belonging.”
The Final Word: Beyond Product, Into Community
Every great brand does more than sell products. Nike doesn’t sell running shoes. It sells the Nike running club. Peloton doesn’t sell bikes. It sells community. Red Bull doesn’t sell energy drinks. It sells danger and adrenaline.
“Taylor Swift doesn’t sell music, she sells belonging,” Hughes concludes.
The Vienna moment proved this definitively. When the product was removed, the brand remained. The community gathered anyway. They sang together. They supported each other.
“In grief of that moment, the brand is about togetherness, resilience, all amazing values that are fantastic role model values for our youth,” Hughes reflects.
That’s the real achievement. Not the billions of dollars or the broken records. The achievement is building something that doesn’t need you to exist.
As Hughes puts it: “Where you can not even—your brand doesn’t even produce the product and yet the community that you’ve built around your brand values stands so strong that they can do it without you.”
That’s the goal. That’s the lesson. That’s what makes Taylor Swift not just a pop star, but a masterclass in modern branding.
Have a look at Ken Hughes Book to learn more – Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection
Jagged with Jasravee, the Marketing Show 
Leave a comment