CONNECTION IS EVERYTHING
26th SEPTEMBER 2025
Share with your team
A Business Playbook Inspired by Taylor Swift’s Tribal Fandom
Launched globally on
september 13
The Future of Connection
The need to understand how to best connect with the seven different sets of customers challenges us ali in retail.
Social, economic and technological forces shape every generation’s expectations, from how they want to live their lives, how they work, and what, where and how they buy. Old product-driven business models, channels, and marketing communication strategies are quickly fading in relevance.
Already, today’s customer and employee expect Instant and Convenient. Once value-adding propositions, these are now perhaps base expectations in our one-click, one-swipe world. It affects our expectations around product and service delivery and store-of-choice for customers.
Authenticity has also become key in customer and brand interactions. We want to invite ‘real’ into our lives (further compounded by the ‘artificial’ element of AI) and brands and retailers that foster genuine strong connections in their communities, are winning. It is why ‘local’ is so important.
Connection has become a core modern value of our times, catalysed by both our ever-dehumanising digital reality and a post pandemic PTSD response. We all collectively crave deeper and more meaningful connections, the essence of what it is to be a happy human.
Three CX Questions/ Reflections for your business from the ‘Future of Connection’
- What does your customer journey and store proposition look like through the eyes of Gen Alpha or future Gen Beta consumers? What specifically do you need to change to be significantly more relevant to the next generation of consumers?
- Where in the service delivery can you dial-up authenticity and step away from commoditisation? How can you instil a ‘realness’ to what you do beyond your competitive set?
- How can you extend the brand connection beyond the simple purchase, service or consumption moment? Connection is an emotive state. How can you instil a philosophy around connection in your business?
The Reality of Expectations
The brand ladder that leads us from dissatisfaction all the way to an empowered and engaged customer and employee is based around the relationship between Experience v Expectations.
Clearly, failing to meet expectations results in feelings of dissatisfaction. However, even when experiences match expectations (satisfaction), a space we measure with satisfaction surveys and NPS, we still find ourselves in unsafe territory.
Today’s customer expects you to go beyond their expectations, to excite & delight. This is how brand storytelling is fuelled, not by simply delivering on what was already expected.
Customer Intimacy goes beyond customer experience. It is the space where you foster a sense of closeness with your customer, an emotive space. It is the foundation for engagement and loyalty, the space where your brand logo gets inked on someone’s skin, the moment they become your strongest marketing asset as a true brand ambassador.
It is in surpassing expectations that you will delight your customers, how you lay down the foundations for lifetime value and true emotive loyalty. You all need to appoint an ‘excite & delight’ director, whose role is to bring CX alive in-store in a way that goes beyond expectation.
Three CX Questions/ Reflections for your business from the ‘The Reality of Expectations’
- How do you strengthen the customer relationship when you realise a customer is dissatisfied? How is the conflict resolved beyond the customers’ expectations and in a way that strengthens the customer: brand relationship beyond pre-dissatisfaction levels?
- Where are the moments of delight in your customer journey that have most ROI? Where could you implement a change to make your customer smile and to give them a reason to tell your brand/store story?
- How do you curate and encourage peer-to-peer sharing relating to your brand experience within customer networks? The ‘like & subscribe’ models of old are now less relevant. What can you do to shift to a ‘care & share’ model?
Taylormaking: A Tribal Belonging & 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 store 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 Brand from ‘Taylormaking’:
- How do you leverage social media channels to let the customer see behind the curtain of the store and business?
- How could you invite the customer in? Where along the store 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 emotionally 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 reenforced 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.
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.
DECODE, DELIGHT, DEVOTE: TURNING CUSTOMERS INTO TRIBES THROUGH GAMIFICATION
THE HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF LOYALTY: CX CONNECTION IS EVERYTHING
COURAGE, TRUST & BELIEF IN CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
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.
Share with your team
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.