Personal Brand Spotlight: Taylor Swift
Few have mastered building loyalty the way the global superstar has. So, what Swift techniques can you take away for your own personal brand?
To say a Taylor Swift album will skyrocket to the top of the charts is an understatement. At this point, she seems to teleport there. Her The Eras Tour continues to sell out stadiums and is tipped to move the superstar into billionaire territory.
In the last week, Swift has broken an Australian chart record previously held by Michael Jackson. She dominates all five of the ARIA Album Chart top spots. Jackson held three of the top five positions the week after he passed away in 2009. Swift also has another sixth album in the top ten.
Whether you resonate with the Swift phenomenon or not, the music juggernaut has become one of the most influential people in the world. And one of the most significant personal brands of our era. One built on both her skills and business savvy.
Swift just released her re-recorded album, Speak Now. This marks the third instalment in the singer-songwriter’s bid to regain control of her music. It follows her former label selling her back catalogue. The re-recording mission is made a success by her legion of fans' fierce loyalty.
Swift was born in Pennsylvania. At age 13, her family sold their farm to move to Tennessee to further Swift’s music prospects. By age 14, she was signed to Sony/ATV, becoming their youngest-ever signing in history.
As a child, she’s said she played the guitar until her fingers bled and still proudly bares the scars from that time.
Swift would go on to become the female artist in the United States with the most chartered songs. She currently has 12 Grammys and MTV Music Video Awards to her name. And in 2021, she won the Global Icon Award at the Brit Awards. She was the first female artist ever to do so.
You don’t need Swift-level stardom to take away her key lessons in personal branding. Here’s some of what Swift does best, that you can easily adopt in your own personal brand.
1. The Power of Storytelling
Good personal branding is not about self-promotion. It’s using your unique background, experience and skills to help solve a problem for people.
Swift's astronomical success is built on the same principles. She solves a problem for her fans. She uses her personal experiences to connect with their experiences. Her music epitomises the power of storytelling. At times sounding like one big journal of her life. She often says it’s how she processes her experiences. Much like marketing sensation Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Document, don’t create.”
It’s likely not the technical value of Swift’s music that most resonates with fans - it’s the emotional value. The skilled lyricist uses her own pain points, like relationships and loss. And she connects them with the shared experience of her audience.
Taking the lead from Swift, how are you using storytelling in your own personal brand? Showing you understand your audience's experiences, and building emotional connections.
2. The Creative Process
Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte shares his ‘CODE’ formula. It’s a personal knowledge management framework:
Capture
Organise
Distill
Express
The book shares Swift's surprising technique for capturing songwriting ideas. This simply centres around her phone. In it, she’s said to capture one-liners as they come to her often during other activities. Her songs are regularly created by stringing these lines together at a later date. Saving them for whenever it becomes relevant.
When it comes to your own personal brand, how are you building your own ‘Second Brain’? Or, what was historically referred to as a ‘commonplace book’. One that captures useful ideas and information as they arise. Knowing while they may not be valuable right now, they will be in the future.
3. Creating a Community around a Personal Brand
Swifts fans are a force unto themselves - the self-appointed ‘Swifties’. While she may now own the trademark (she is a savvy businesswoman after all), it's a fan-led brand. One that connects her people to each other. Often demonstrated in the fan frenzy online, for finding the “Easter eggs” of each Swift album.
Swift has created a community around her messages. How are you creating a community around your own personal brand message?
4. Surprise and Delight Your People
A fiercely loyal community isn’t just created by good marketing. In her early years, Swift reportedly responded to each fan message and comment.
Gary Vaynerchuk has even coined the ‘Taylor Swift Rule’. He claims Swift has hacked culture in the noisy marketplace. He proposes this is about focusing on those things that on paper don’t make sense from an ROI perspective. But, have huge amplification potential - ‘scaling the unscalable’.
From small to big gestures, Swift has mastered the ‘surprise and delight’ factor for her fans. Swift previously released two surprise albums, Folklore and Evermore, in five months. These were produced during worldwide lockdowns. And these bonuses didn’t compromise on quality. The albums triggered a slew of Grammy nominations, with Folklore winning Album of the Year.
How is your own personal brand surprising and delighting your people? How are you making these high-quality experiences?
5. An Evolving Personal Brand
We know that in personal branding, consistency is key. But, your personal brand cannot also stay stagnant.
In Dori Clarke’s Reinventing You, the personal branding expert proposes at some stage (or several) in your career, you’ll need to reinvent yourself.
Wherever your transition leads you, your reputation can follow you into new endeavours. Stanford professor, Jeffery Pfeffer, calls this the psychological phenomenon of the ‘halo effect’. Whereby, if you’re talented in one domain, people will assume you have the ability to be good in another.
Swift seems to understand this well. The once-country singer now dominates multiple genres. This wasn’t about going off-brand, but rather evolving. She slowly pivoted into pop, before releasing 1989, her first full pop album. Her transition proved a success. The album, released in 2014, is the most awarded pop album by any artist in history.
As her sound evolves, so does her visual style. Swift first entered stardom as a sundress-clad, cowboy boot-wearing teenager. And she had the tight curls to match. Her style transitioned into sequin body suits, signature red lipstick and much more. She evolves with the audience and shares the stories behind the changing seasons of her life. For your personal brand, how are you evolving with your audience? Ever-expanding your skills and knowledge.
Of her evolving music, Swift has said that she likes to challenge herself. Pushing her comfort zone with new skills and knowledge continues to pay off.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant discusses the importance of ‘specific knowledge’. Ravikant describes this as the knowledge you can’t be trained for. Because, if society can train someone else in it, it can also replace you.
Others can share your subject matter expertise. But, your ’specific knowledge’ starts to form your unique category of one.
Specific knowledge is formed not just in the narrow lens of your field. But, in your unique combination of interests. So, how are you building interdisciplinary knowledge? In their book, The Unfair Advantage, Ash Ali and Husan Kubba propose this is how creativity is formed:
Creativity is largely about training your mind to connect things you learn in one domain to situations that seem completely unrelated. This is known as intersectional or interdisciplinary thinking.
After proving her agility across music categories, it comes as little surprise that one of the most influential storytellers of our time has transferred her skills into film. In 2022, it was revealed she penned and will direct her first feature film.
How are you making your personal brand indispensable through your unique and interdisciplinary skills and knowledge?
6. Personal Brand Personality
Swift has always presented a more relatable persona compared to many industry counterparts. Often as the all-American girl next door (even her family’s farm was a Christmas Tree farm). Yet, she offers an almost goofy like twist, appearing to never take herself too seriously.
What does your own personal brand personality say about you? How is it differentiated in the marketplace? The small details matter. Learn more in my personal brand personality series.
Whatever your role, what lessons from brand Swift can you use to cut through the noisy marketplace?
