CONNECTING WITH THE FUTURE CONSUMER
7/8th October 2025
A Business Playbook Inspired by Taylor Swift’s Tribal Fandom
Launched globally on
september 13
DAY ONE: OPENING KEYNOTE
Are The Robots Out To Get Us?
Change in all forms presses down on every industry and the demands placed on customer fulfilment are no exception. Change comes at us as Technological, Economic, Social, Regulatory and most critically from our customers’ and consumer expectations themselves.
To survive (and thrive) every brand needs to exert a greater force against these changes, otherwise we will be crushed by them. To survive and ensure our businesses are future focused, we need to have the courage to embrace new directions. We need to collaborate and have an excellence in execution to have better connections with our customers. Connection is everything.
It would be arrogant of us to assume that we can continue to run our businesses the same way over the next 10 years as we have over the past 10, as arrogant as Kodak thinking digital photography would be a fad, or Nokia feeling their scale would protect them against the iPhone. Arrogance kills entire brands and industries, and it could kill your business faster than you think. As customer expectations change, alongside our business and service landscape, so must we.
Staying relevant is key to survival and so we aim to focus on what our customers value. It is in exploring and understanding the values of the modern customer connection, we can build a business for future success.
We now live in a ‘Digital First World’ – a world where we all reach for our digital devices first to answer any question or solve any problem. The digital Immersion is only going to increase with the coming reality, as AI and Robotics converge alongside customer expectations. CX, and indeed society as a whole, will never be the same again.
AI is set to change every industry. Most importantly, it will unleash a new set of customer expectations around hyper personalisation and relevance for customers in their product and service interactions.
Effective AI is about implementing technology solutions in a way that makes a customer feel something. Feel seen, heard or valued. It is about using technology to better connect. Recall the healthcare examples of the blood donor clinic and Inter Mountain health installing speech-to-chart technology, freeing the human to be an empath.
Every industry is preparing to change the business model because of the scale and depth AI can deliver. The education industry shifts from ‘teaching the masses’ (a commodity approach) to a ‘one-to-one’ model, facilitated by agentic AI.
Agentic AI will also be the most exciting and challenging thing to happen to consumer decision making and brand marketing. When we hand over our purchase decision making to the machine, forget about B2B and B2C. Welcome to B2M, Business-to-Machine.
We will become more comfortable with the algorithm running our lives and making our decisions. And the moment we change how we buy – the demands on customer fulfilment change with it.
Five key consultancy questions
from Keynote One
- How is your product/service offering changing to take account of the Gen Z and Gen Alpha generational demands, the generations that will snap the old models across their knee?
- How are you empowering your employees around AI, to ensure they understand that AI implementation is freeing their resources to be more creative, spend time with customers, and do what humans do best – connect?
- Are your current AI implementations focused around making your customer feel something? Is there a way you can ensure AI spend is customer centred and not just process or operationally centred?
- How can you use AI to hyper-personalise the service delivery aspect of your brand?
- How are you harnessing Agentic AI, or preparing for a future where this will drive a large part of consumer decision making? Invest now for that coming future.
DAY ONE - CLOSING KEYNOTE
Invest In The Experience
We go nowhere if we continue to work within the confines and ways of working of the past. Sticking with the business models of old will not change the direction of success.
We need the courage and vulnerability to set a new course, to ‘swim away from the shore’.
Customer Experience is the new competitive advantage. In a world of commoditised product and service delivery, commoditisation supercharged now by AI, the key source of differentiation for our customers is the brand and retail experience.
Connection is Everything. How we connect with our customers is key, but this can only be brought about when we also invest in the Employee Experience (EX)
Empowering employees and store associates to truly make a difference is where we bring CX to life.
We looked at employee empowerment through the Wizard of Oz.
Heart
We need to have talent that recognises that loyalty and brand advocacy is built in the moments where a customer experiences delight.
Brain
Data and systems are useless unless there is human creativity at play in harnessing their power.
Remember that Octopus Energy story of playing each customer music from their youth as they waited for their call to be answered. Technology, but tech with emotional power.
Intelligence is not the data or software. It is the ideas we have in how best to harness it. Invest in ideation and creative flow
Courage
We also need to empower employees to make the correct decisions, and to put the data in their hands that allows them to do this.
The Ritz Carlton laptop story would not have happened if the employee was not empowered. But it would also not have happened unless she had access to the data relating to the need of the customer and their location.
Let’s empower our employees and give them the data and systems to make a real difference in-store and for customer fulfilment.
Once you bed down EX, you can then release the magic of CX
Going beyond the customer expectation is key. Remember the smiles on the children and other healthcare staff as they super-hero ’ed their way into surgery. Or the genuine delight and tears of the Pick n’ Pay shoppers as their shopping was paid for by the brand.
Never forget that CX is about how we make our customers feel.
Five key consultancy questions
from Keynote Two
- Where is the evidence that you are spending time ‘outside the box’ in terms of business strategy and approach? What alternative directions could you take?
- How are you building a culture of employee empowerment in your organisation?
- How do you celebrate employees internally when they deliver outstanding CX? And how do you share those stories internally?
- What are your Goldfish Stories? Who is empowered with creating them? If we don’t have a story to tell, our brand is invisible?
- How can you better use the data and systems you have to better engage with your customers? If Octopus Energy can do it, so can you.
DAY TWO – CLOSING KEYNOTE
TAYLORMAKING: A Tribal Loyalty & Connection Playbook
Taylor Swift is an entertainer, singer, songwriter, musician, producer, director, actress, entrepreneur, fashion icon and global brand. She is also the Queen of CX. The global brand success you are witnessing is the ROI on 20 years of continuous CX investment.
Connections take time and brands that invest over the long-term tend to win. Other musicians win awards and are talented artists, but they do not have the record for the biggest grossing tour of all time, the biggest grossing concert movie of all time, the most streamed movie of all time, the most streamed album of all time. So, what gives? What does a 36-year-old entertainer have to teach the retail industry?
The Swiftie Tribal Brand Army she has built is the ROI of implementing the 9 core values above, a playbook that can be copied by any brand or business owner to improve CX and EX in their organisation.
Authenticity, Vulnerability & Intimacy
From the birth of social media, Taylor has shared behind-the-scenes footage of her career, life, heartbreaks, and successes. She has continuously shown her customers her authentic self, both on stage and screen, but more importantly in her real life.
From showing how the product is created (footage of her songwriting process, video dance rehearsals) to run-of-the-mill ‘Taylor living her life’, fans were always allowed behind the curtain. She portrays her authentic self in every interaction and thrives on Customer Intimacy, fostering a sense of closeness with her customers.
Collaboration & Together
Famous for her ‘heart hands’, she believes that the customer relationship is made up of two parts, the brand and the customer. Both parties are needed for the magic of the Swiftie Army to come to life.
She has continuously torn away the line between us and them, between producer and consumer. She has invited fans into her life (literally into her home), into her product (her videos) and stepped into their lives (visiting their homes, weddings).
She is fiercely protective of her fans, calling out bad behaviour on social media, on screen or live from the stage. She believes in inclusion and collaboration. She knows she is nothing without her fans and places the fan experience at the centre of most of what she does.
Delight, Appreciation & Belonging
Even in a commodity product delivery (a live performance to 70,000 fans in an arena) she will take the time to sing down the lens of individual fan phones as she performs, giving each fan their unique personal experience. She understands how important it is to make any individual customer feel.
She also shows her appreciation to her employees, giving them the limelight on stage and never making her dancers feel like ‘back-up’ artists. It may be her name on the ticket but it is a collaborative show. She treats journalists with the same respect as her fellow artists, taking time to get to know them in advance of interviews. She famously tipped her 42 truck drivers $100,000 each on the first leg of her Eras Tour.
The power of the Swiftie Army was visualised in Taylorgating, where up to 40,000+ fans gathered outside the stadium. Empowered customers came together to co-celebrate the brand to whom they belong, often at religious levels. This is tribal belonging at its best and the ROI for significant CX.
My last slide sums it all up. It is the way we make our customers and employees feel that matters.
Thirteen Questions/Reflections for your business from ‘Taylormaking’
- How do you leverage social media channels to let the customer see behind the curtain of the brand and business?
- How could you invite the customer in? Where along the customer journey could you involve customers so that they feel ownership of the brand beyond the transactional nature of retail?
- How can you be more intimate and vulnerable with customers? What elements of the brand story or CX could foster a sense of closeness? Get specific.
- How can you tear away the line between producer and consumer and enter a collaborative space with your customers?
- How can you personalise commodity/scaled experience to the point of making a customer feel special?
- Do your customers feel supported by your business, or do you simply want their money? Where is the evidence of that support or do you hide behind process and operations? How can you curate stories relating to brand care and support and have them shared by customers in their peer networks?
- Where can you delight customers or employees by going beyond their expectations? Where can you invest beyond the norm to deepen the customer experience?
- How do you show your customers you truly appreciate them in a powerfully emotional way?
- How do you show your appreciation for all your stakeholders (employees, partners, providers)? Do they feel they belong to a brand family or just another ‘resource’ you are utilising for your own gain?
- What have you done to build your own brand army? What specific actions have you taken in your local community to build a brand that attracts belonging? If your brand or business was a cult, why would people follow you?
- Do your employees and customers know your brand purpose in the community, and is it reinforced and lived throughout all of your touchpoints, both in the physical and digital worlds?
- What have you done in CX delivery that might become a shared ‘brand story’?
- Finally, write to Taylor Swift herself and tell her that Ken Hughes wants his orange glitter hotpants back.
A Business Playbook Inspired by Taylor Swift’s Tribal Fandom
If you were inspired by today’s keynote and would like a deeper dive into Customer Intimacy, Customer Connection and building Tribal Belonging, get yourself a copy of Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection.
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.
COURAGE, TRUST & BELIEF IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
THE HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF LOYALTY: CX CONNECTION IS EVERYTHING
DECODE, DELIGHT, DEVOTE: TURNING CUSTOMERS INTO TRIBES THROUGH GAMIFICATION
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.
