Marketing Midnights: Taylor Swift’s Marketing Strategy
As we near the 1 month anniversary of Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album in the midst of legal battles and ticket frenzies, what better way to celebrate than to take a look at its extraordinary marketing strategy?
In the past, Swift has been known to drop subtle hints known as “easter eggs” to her unsuspecting fans. She has stated that she does this through ‘clothing or jewelry,' and believes the best messages are the cryptic ones (Entertainment Weekly). Leading up to her highly anticipated re-recording of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Swift tweeted a 30-second video revealing scrambled letters that fans had to try and unscramble to get new track names.
Fan Engagement
Using easter eggs is a genius method of fan engagement which Swift especially excels at. Not only do fans look at recent interviews, videos, or any other type of media they can get their hands on to scour for cryptic hints, but they also watch back old videos, songs etc to try and prove their theories right. This constant engagement that the fans are doing with her without much work on Swift’s end, encourages a more intimate bond between the artist and the fan and helps build a strong and loyal fanbase. People also enjoy the sense of community and achievement being such a fan provides, keeping them coming back for more.
While other artists who are not yet as established as Swift may do elaborate marketing campaigns such as Olivia Rodrigo’s clever #SourCarWash, Swift can get away with simply causing chaos within her fandom and watching the news spread like wildfire. On every major social media platform, there is a community of Swifties. With TikTok being the most popular social media app of 2022, it is no wonder that is where the Swifties are too. For Midnights, Swift’s latest release, Swift continued to drop hints for her fans leading up to the release. On TikTok, she started a series called ‘Midnights Meyhem with Me’ where she revealed track names leading up to release day by pulling out a bingo ball with a number corresponding to the track number.
Every night, fans were tuning in in anticipation and for those who didn’t, they would still keep up through the discussions, comments, and tweets, that just kept coming overnight. Fans would also create and speculate about their own theories, resulting in videos on #Swiftok gaining over 13 billion views! (side note: the number 13 seems to be anywhere Taylor Swift related).
With such a large community doing most of the promotion for her, Swift still needed to ensure that the album would be a success for the general public who weren’t keeping up with her every move. On Billboards in New York and London, Spotify helped Swift reveal some lyrics at - you guessed it - Midnight.
Merchandising
Merchandise is another smart way for artists drive sales. Not only does it give the artists free advertising with fans all around the world parading city streets with it, but artists can use it to their best advantage. Swift and her team created FOUR separate versions of the vinyl, each with different numbers to make up a clock when all four were put together. In addition, you could also get some letters and a clock hand to tie in the whole look. This heavily incentivized many fans to purchase all FOUR types of vinyl, regardless of the fact that they all sounded the same, driving up her pure album sales, which is something that contributes heavily to the Billboard charts.
Conclusion
Midnights and subsequently, Taylor Swift occupied the top 10 spots on the billboard hot 100 on the week of October 21-27, 2022. Midnights was also #1 on the Billboard Hot 200 (Swift’s 11th time achieving this). 1.578 million equivalent album units were earned in the U.S, making it the biggest week for any album in 7 years. In conclusion, the marketing and PR put behind Midnights were widely successful. Not all of it can be contributed to the large (but loyal!) fanbase that Swift has steadily built up over the years, but a lot of it was certainly thanks to their efforts. After realizing that Swift may lose a spot in the top 10 of the BBH 100, Swifties formed a quick action plan and came together to stream and buy ‘Question…?’ and ‘Bejeweled’ so that Swift could achieve a new record. The success of this album has shown that fan engagement is not something to be taken lightly and when that power is harnessed, there is a lot of untapped potentials you can use to your advantage. If you’re a musician yourself, or a marketer, looking into working with large groups of people, don’t skim on building connections and spending time interacting with them. Having a loyal fanbase is what’s going to get you through all the rough patches of your career but you have to make sure you’re providing them with value too.
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