TAYLORMAKING:
Styling Better Customer Connections
26th January 2025/ Dublin
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Taylormaking: Styling Better Customer Connections
All that matters is connection. To connect with the self, with others, with community. But so many brands still focus on just their product, their service, their process, their operations. They talk the talk when it comes to customer centricity but remain wholly product centred. For too long marketing and branding has been transactional, brand owners focused on the numbers, the profits, the market share. But those days are over. Today’s modern consumer only wants to do business with brands that have purpose, accessibility, and authenticity.
It is not about our salons or our social media channels. It is not even about our amazing partners and employees. Above all, it is about the customer relationship we cultivate. That is our brand essence.
Taylor Swift is many things. A singer, songwriter, performer, and entertainer. She is a producer, director, entrepreneur, and global icon. But above it all, she is a brand. Her global brand is one of the most successful of our time, built over many years of significant customer connection.
The success you see today (and there are many, from awards won, streaming records broken, and commercial revenues earned) is the reward for her investment in the customer experience. She has built her entire brand on collaborative commerce, the idea of dissolving the traditional US v THEM divide. She may write and produce the music, but the fans/customers own and celebrate it together.
Her Swiftie army is one of the best examples of brand tribal following we have. The sense of community, collective, collaboration and belonging she has carefully crafted has given her a depth of emotive loyalty any brand would wish for. And this goes beyond high-school fans.
First generation Swifties are now in their 30s and 40s and are still engaged and empowered customers (a customer who sells your product for you within their peer-to-peer network). If you invest heavily in a relationship, you reap the benefits.
But how to invest? How can we best focus on the relationship? Easy. You focus on the things that matter. We discussed 9 attributes that every brand should focus on bringing to life in their customer relationships.
This is how you will build your own brand army.
Authenticity
Intimacy
Belonging
Vulnerability
Collaboration
Purpose
Delight
Appreciation
Together
Authenticity and Vulnerability
On the day we saw many examples of Taylor being her authentic and vulnerable self. Sharing behind the scenes footage of songwriting, dance rehearsals, showing her vulnerability in her own videos from her own life. As her fame arc increased, she knew it was imperative that she remained ‘the girl next door’, that accessibility was key for successful customer connection.
She has actively torn away the line between fan and the famous, eager to share the successes with her fans, her extended family (Swifties affectionately refer to Swift as ‘Mother’). When she wins an award is it ‘our award’ not hers. She invites her customers into her home, into her life, into her actual product (music videos).
You need to think about how to make your brand relationship more authentic and an experience. While the product may be haircuts, colouring, styles or aesthetics, the brand part is the relationship and we need to be authentically real in this space.
Excite and Delight
She believes in ‘excite and delight’ as a core strategy, that you should go beyond customer expectations at every opportunity. Her album launches have often been gamified, clues buried in previous videos or social media posts. For one of her album launches during the pandemic, her own record label didn’t even know the album existed until 24-hours before she dropped it on Spotify.
She sends customers gifts in the post, has surprised them by visiting their homes, and turned up at their weddings. Every fan at an Eras Tour concert is given an LED bracelet, the crowd themselves part of the lighting show. Collaboration is key.
Recall those fans being surprised by Taylor at the Chicago Reputation tour, their emotion and how they threw their arms around her. Our customers deserve to be delighted and excited. We are not selling toothbrushes or bleach. We sell style and confidence, self-worth and beauty. Excite and delight is a core part of what we sell and so we should ensure it is core part of what our brands are.
But to do that we need to bring it to life with our customers.
The Power Of Tribal Belonging
Witnessing the power of the collective and the tribal belonging gives us an insight into how you will benefit from investment in relationship and customer experience. The crowds that gather outside a stadium (Taylorgating) began as 20,000+ finally reaching 45,000+.
That means while there are 65,000+ inside, Swifties unlucky enough to not get precious tickets (only 5% of those registering for the ticket lottery ever actually got to buy tickets) turn up to collectively consume the product regardless. Even in the hammering rain, 20,000 ‘customers’ gather to belong, be part of the community, to take part in the brand rituals (the friendship bracelets, the costumes, the singalong).
So, ask yourself the question, what could this look like for your brand? What would an empowered customer do for your market reach? But if you want this level of community, this level of brand tribal following, you need to invest for the long term.
The Swiftie army wasn’t created in a day. What you are looking at is the ROI of 15+ years of customer connection, customer experience strategy and collaborative commerce. To have our own brand army, we need to activate the same commitment to the customer connection.
Customer Connection
Be clear about what your brand stands for, its purpose, and seek to connect with your customer. The old days of simply connecting through commercial channels and for profit are over. The profit will come (Taylor is the first artist to be added to the Forbes Billionaire list for her music revenues alone) but they follow the investment in customer connection.
There have been other stars. Madonna, Rhianna, Beyonce, Pink, Lady Gaga. They are all famous, all excellent performers. But they have not reached the heights of Taylor’s brand. Why is that? It is because they just focused on the product, the music, and didn’t nurture the customer connection.
Brand success lies in that connection. As we enter a deeper digital society, connection becomes even more important. Every brand needs to focus more on emotionally connecting with their customer, and thanks to AI and enabling technology, we can now do that at scale.
Look for every opportunity to better connect with your customer, to make a difference in their lives, to give them something to tell their friends about. This is how we bring the brand to life.
Make your Customer Feel Seen, Heard and Valued
But it still takes creative input, it still takes someone to pick a moment along a customer journey to make the difference. It still is about making a customer feel seen, heard and valued (remember the United airlines story of Kerry Drake flying home to make it to his mother’s bedside). It is about the Brazilian doctor taking time and energy to make his paediatric patients feel like superheroes. About the North Carolina coffee shop rolling out the red carpet for their customers.
So, take some time to sit down together as a team and think to yourself, what would Taylor do? Look at the customer data you have, the customer journey, and pick some moments to bring connection to life. Be clear on your brand purpose. Communicate with your customers with authenticity, intimacy, and vulnerability. Focus on going beyond customer expectations. Appoint a Surprise & Delight Director to the business. Look for ways to invite the customer in, to the salon, to brand ownership, build a collective, a community.
You may not win a Grammy award, but you will win the hearts and minds of your customers, and that is worth its weight in gold.
10 things you need to ask yourself to build better customer connections
- How can you better collaborate with your customers?
- How can you invite them behind the curtain?
- How can you better personalise key touchpoints on the customer journey?
- How can you go beyond their expectations on a regular basis?
- What have you done that might become a ‘brand story’ for you and have your customers share it in their peer network?
- How have you leveraged intimacy and vulnerability to foster deeper emotional connections with your customers?
- How have you brought Employee Experience to life in the same way so that your employees feel empowered to deliver amazing CX?
- How have you shown your customers that you appreciate them in a powerfully emotional way (not loyalty cards/points)?
- How can you cultivate a sense of belonging and community for your business? Make it about more than just a salon visit?
- Actually go and get a Phorest tattoo on your body (terms and conditions apply. This one may or may not have any actual effect on your CX but be a great story for next year’s conference)
More content from Ken
To get a more detailed feel for Ken Hughes content, check out his Blog – The Blue Dot Consumer. Widely read by those in the marketing, customer experience and retail worlds, it is full of in-depth discussion and content relating to all things consumer.
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For those too lazy to read blogs, and to view further visual content and past performances from Ken Hughes, check out the YouTube channel where he discusses all things consumer and customer experience related.
