Lifetime Loyalty and Taylor Swift

I’ve been very lucky to have been to some amazing gigs, festivals, hot tub holidays and cool girl city breaks in my life (pro tip – always seek out a rooftop bar). However, Tuesday 18^th June 2024 proved to be the greatest night of all of these experiences. Why? Well because it was the day that I finally got to be in the same space as the amazing Taylor Swift, where she sang to me (and 67999 other people), beautifully and unforgettably, for over 3 hours.

I have explained before that I didn’t really get into her music massively until the release of Folklore but since that time I have been SO majorly into it that it is frightening to me, someone who prides myself on my live music experiences, that I’ve never seen her perform in person.  Her music has been such a constant comfort, helping me think through feelings, assuring me of the existence and validity of my experiences, her lyrical poetry inspiring me to think more creatively about the frustrations of reality, that I absolutely and fundamentally needed to see her in front of me with my own two eyes.

So yes, I was desperate for The Eras Tour in Cardiff date to arrive.

I won’t go into the detail of the traumas of securing tickets over two days (thanks album purchase of ‘Midnights’ pre-sale code and friends who are Principality Stadium members) over a year ago, how, amidst the most frenzied ticket purchasing experience of my life (and I’ve had a few) I had to try and also juggle the fact that my daughter freaked out in the upper tiers of the stadium at Harry Styles, wasn’t allowed to stand on the floor as she wasn’t old enough, with my own personal need to be as close to Taylor as possible. Another major point of consternation arose because almost everyone I knew wanted to go and a) I didn’t know how many tickets we’d all collectively get, and then b) I also didn’t really know how I was going to then share them out (yes, I may have lost friends as a consequence).

I also won’t talk at length about how we picked our outfits, how we made our friendship bracelets, how I broke my daughter out of school so we could get into town early (shh), the complex logistical arrangements of meeting friends who travelled from across the land to come and whether or not they could bring luggage (She couldn’t. Pack light. YOUR BAG MUST BE NO BIGGER THAN A SHEET OF A4).

Much preparation was involved. But finally, the moment arrived and The Era’s Tour clock countdown appeared.

It was everything I hoped for and more.  Just pure joy, and connection within such a wonderfully supportive, safe, space.  I loved it intensely and have been on a major post Taylor blues comedown ever since.

And so now to BUSINESS! And yes, there were some Business lessons within the experience and I’d listen up if I was you because it was quite clear to me that Taylor Swift herself must have actually read my Coldplay blog because the show ticked two of the three tips and tricks boxes that I had previously posited as essential ingredients of growth and global domination.

1) An appreciation of impressive operations management. A given. And 2) how contextualising your performance to your location provided an amazing ability to connect. I give this stuff away for free you know (well with great thanks to my beloved Cardiff University employer). She wasn’t as concerned about 3) the sustainability piece it would seem because we managed to walk out of the stadium with our light up wristbands, not because we had deliberately stolen them as a memento, rather she didn’t proactively do everything possible to make us give them back like Coldplay did.

I think Taylor, in her usual indomitable way, raised the stakes on the location contextualisation front though.  Seeing her do it, after Coldplay’s experience, made me realise that location contextualisation is actually a form of mass customisation. Some of you might be familiar with the term ‘mass customisation’? If you’re not there’s a useful Harvard Business Review article which explores 4 different types.  The Four Faces of Mass Customization (hbr.org) but basically it’s about how you can deliver a mass produced product or service, glean the associated economies of scale, whilst also appealing to the customer’s ever relentless and demanding need for personal consideration, thought and care.  By making some minor adaptations, or customisations, you can make people feel special, that you’ve delivered something just for them, so they value the proposition more.

To produce a show as slick and impressive as The Eras Tour it just has to be well rehearsed so you can’t change it radically every time you perform.  Cleverly, Taylor provides a series of customisation points throughout each performance to ensure that the show really connects and that you leave feeling that you experienced something special.

The first opportunity is the obligatory name checking the city that she was performing in (we’ll gloss over the fact that she said it was her first time performing in Wales when she had played the Radio 1 Big Weekend in Swansea) but then she said, in the same spirit of Chris Martin, “Shwmae! Croeso I daith Eras”!  How are you doing? Welcome to The Eras Tour! Cue massive cheer! Taylor spoke Welsh!

Kam Saunders, one of her dancers, who has now become famous in his own right, provided more Welsh interludes. There’s a part in the song ‘We are never ever getting back together” which, in its original form, is where Taylor speaks the words “like ever” after she has sung the song’s title in the chorus, to stress her seriousness that she is like never, ever, ever, going to get back with him.  This pause in the song for a spoken interjection has provided a major point of mass customisation where now, Swifties in their Eras Tour stadium of choice wait to hear the local catch phrase that Kam will now say in exchange. In Cardiff, we had the brilliantly onomatopoeic “Ych a Fi!” cut to a massive cheer from all of the Welshies in the audience!

They have done this across the globe, you can see a collation here. Kam has another ‘special surprise’ mass customisation point which has been added thanks to the addition of The Tortured Poet’s Department section, an album released this April. In “I can do it with a broken heart” Taylor shares her experience of performing The Eras Tour whilst devastated from breakups but also, because she is such a professional artist,  she manages to keep it all together and ‘hit her marks’ even though inside ‘she wants to die’.   There’s a part in the song which replicates her stage manager talking to her via her in-ear monitor to tell her when to move to the next section which is simply “one, two, three, four”. In Cardiff, Kam of course declared “un, dai, tri, pedwar” 😊.

Another major cheer!

Another point of difference are her outfits.  There will be 152 shows of the Eras Tour, each where she performs for over 3 hours, this requires not just costume during the course of the concert but also the opportunity to wear different outfits on different dates.  When I was watching the livestream of her Sunday Wembley set on Tiktok (an attempt to relive the magic) I took great joy in the Swiftie comments predicting which outfit combination she would wear “purple cupcake” “champagne sparkles”, then when the outfit of choice was revealed there would be a collective sigh that they hadn’t got it right or a jubilant ‘I KNEW IT!’ when they did predict the outfit choice. You can see the array of her different costume options by @kfilsonart here:

The most eagerly anticipated ever changing surprise section happens towards the end of the show, when Taylor sings 2 “surprise songs” one on the piano and one with the guitar.  At the beginning of The Eras Tour she said she was always going to try doing something different in this section and, for the most part, she has managed this, but more recently, she has innovated and is now delivering song ‘mashups’, which delight us Swifties thanks to her clever ability to connect two or even three songs together.

It’s special when you’re in the stadium, anticipating what she is going to play but it’s also special for her legion of global fans tracking the concerts online, who say such things as “I’m dead! Why couldn’t she have waited two more dates until I was there to play #TaylorSwiftSurpriseSongoftheirDreams”.  You can get an insight into the detail within which these surprise songs are tracked and anticipated here in this post by @headfirstfearless

The joy of providing special surprise opportunities like this is there will be so many fans in the stadium whose absolute favourite is the song that she picks. You feel special. My favourite song on The Tortured Poets Department is “I Hate it Here” and I didn’t dare to dream that that would be one of the acoustic slot songs in Cardiff, but ….  it was.

And I cried.

Did Taylor, with her witchy magic to articulate express what we all individually and collectively feel …. somehow….. know? The joy of these moments is that the customisation, although for everyone, manages to hit a good proportion of her fans absolutely personally. Because her songs mean so much to them. That song means so much to me.

So anyway, I think I have identified a fifth form of mass customisation which is that some form of personalisation is achieved through these small ‘special surprise!’ customisation points within a standardised offer.  I’ve reviewed the four types suggested in the Gilmore and Pine HBR article and none of them quite fit.  Perhaps there is a newer term to explain this phenomenon that I don’t know about, let me know if you know it, but I haven’t got time to conduct an extensive trawl of the marketing literature 😊 For the purposes of this blog, I’ve invented the term ‘Special Surprise Mass Customisation’.

Delivering mass customisation via special surprise opportunities is not just a Taylor phenomenon… it’s found in loads of successful organisations when you think about it, the ever-revolving muffins of Costa Coffee – ooo Mini Egg ones for Easter!  The ever changing Aldi ‘Special Buys’ aisles ‘ooo a wet suit! ooo an Aldi version of a squishmallow!’. The main product offer remains the same, and highly standardised, but the small opportunities for sparkle and difference make each experience feel more unique. It’s still mass delivery of a service, but the special sparkles make it feel more memorable, and more personal somehow, and yes it encourages your brand loyalty as you stick around to see what they can come up with next.

No-one could ever achieve this as personally as Taylor achieves it however ❤️

One of the major tenets of a lean approach is the knowledge that customer loyalty is everything. It’s much more profitable to keep your customers happy, they’ll tell other people, your business will grow, than to keep trying to win new customers at the expense of the one’s you already have. Rewarding customer loyalty is a key part of this whole proposition and these Special Surprise Mass Customisation points are a brilliant way to achieve this.  Those who know all the songs, those who know how the Tour works, will be able to potentially realise the most joy.  It actually also introduces gamification into the artist tour experience too.  Eras Tour concerts have a bit of a Panini Sticker Book collectability about them.  You don’t just get to live it once, if you follow along on social media, you can spot the patterns, collect the stickers, spot the differences and seek to complete your own, personalised, lifetime Taylor Devotion album.