What Communications Professionals Can Learn from Taylor Swift
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Any time Taylor Swift does anything –– and I mean ANYTHING –– I get a text message from a family member, friend, or colleague asking me if I’ve seen it. “Yes, of course I’ve seen it,” I answer on command. “I saw the moment it happened because I was up at 5:30 a.m. to watch her announce it on a grainy video from a fan live-streaming her show half a world away.”
What always surprises me is that the person on the other end of that text message knows about whatever she said or did. But it shouldn’t surprise me at all, not anymore. That’s because Taylor is the biggest pop star on the planet –– one of the most successful recording artists of all time; a four-time Grammy Album of The Year winner; a cultural icon who makes news simply by showing up at an NFL game.
Why is that? Yes, her music is incredible (I’m biased, obviously). Yes, she’s a prolific writer churning out albums at an unprecedented pace –– eight, in fact, since 2019, with another on the way in April. Yes, she is amid a ridiculous 151-date career-spanning international tour, including 75 shows in the United States alone.
But I’d suggest a different reason why nearly everyone –– whether you like her music or not –– knows what Taylor is doing at any given moment: she’s a master of marketing and public relations. Turns out, a millennial woman who grew up addicted to the Internet knows how to use the tools at her disposal to connect with her ever-growing army of Swifties.
Her message is compelling.
The media and the public have always been interested in Taylor’s personal life, but instead of addressing any of her relationships or news headlines directly, she’s created an entire universe full of lore that blends her private life with messages about heartbreak, insecurities, friendship, and fame. Pick a topic. Taylor probably has a song about it.
She delivers that message in a compelling way.
Taylor doesn’t just deliver her messages in song –– she hides it in everything from her music video imagery to the aesthetics of her clothes. She even hides secret messages in the liner notes of her albums, capitalizing certain letterS to form Words and phrases that SwIFties Take and methodIcally “dE-code.” As her career progressed, those secret messages took on a life of their own, turning Swifties into master sleuths, searching for “easter eggs” in every Instagram post, red-carpet outfit, and interview.
She harnesses the Internet to spread her message far and wide.
Taylor could teach graduate-level courses on how to use social media. She and her team not only masterfully weave the lore about her life into Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok posts, but Taylor herself scrolls her “For You Pages” and engages with fans (Swifties call this “Taylurking”). She’s managed to expand the fan experience with the Internet and make it feel like you, as a fan, really know her.
She knows how to make a moment.
Swifties will tell you that when Taylor goes dark, you should be scared. When she showed up at the 2022 MTV Music Video Awards, she’d been fairly quiet for nearly a year following the re-release of her album Red (Taylor’s Version). Rumors swirled in the hours before the show that she would be there, and Taylor grabbed that opportunity to make a statement. “I thought it might be a fun moment to tell you that my brand new album comes out October 21,” she said to a room full of screaming fans. “And I will tell you more at midnight.”
Over the next few months, fans stayed up until midnight near-daily out of fear of missing some crucial announcement about a single, a limited edition vinyl, or even just the NAME of one of the tracks from her new album, Midnights. A few years later, she did it again at the Grammy’s when she announced her forthcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, during her acceptance speech.
Taylor’s ability to craft a compelling message, deliver it uniquely, harness the Internet to spread it far and wide, and turn any event into a moment sets her apart from her peers. And her wins prove that. 2023 was Taylor’s most successful year yet, and one of the most successful for any artist ever. When she released Midnights, she charted every song on the Billboard Hot 100, including taking over the entire top 10 spots, something no other artist had ever done. More than a year later, she charted five albums in the top 10 of the Billboard 200, the only living artist to ever do so. And her world-spanning Eras Tour is the highest-grossing tour of all time and the first ever to top $1 billion in sales.
As communications professionals, we can learn a lot from Taylor Swift. I can’t think of another person or brand that would compel me to set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning so I could furiously scroll TikTok to find out if all the theories and rumors that she would announce her highly-anticipated 1989 (Taylor’s Version) re-release were true. But as Taylor told Entertainment Weekly in 2019, “I've trained them to be that way.”