For a brand-building blueprint, look no further than the pop culture colossus.
“When I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe.” “I’ve never heard silence quite this loud.” “He’s long gone when he’s next to me.”
Taylor Swift is fond of a paradox in her songwriting, returning to the device again and again.
I’m a paradox fan, too. (Sadly, that’s pretty much all we have in common.) For me, though, it’s in brand building.
In an attention economy, brands need stopping power, wherever they can find it. Paradox is powerful because it creates pause for thought.
Ikea’s “The wonderful everyday”. Airbnb “Belong anywhere”. “The world’s local bank” for HSBC. These paradoxes capture our attention because they defy logic and then engage us by creating new meaning from familiar words.
Perhaps we’re also drawn to a paradox because we all contain them. (As an attention-loving introvert I speak from experience.)
What sets Taylor Swift apart from the rest of us, though, is the way she puts her contradictions to work.
You may not like “Tay Tay”. Her music. Or the deluge of earnest and often over-intellectualised analysis of what exactly it is that she means (yup, sorry to add to it).
But it’s hard not to respect the way she’s built one of the biggest brands and fandoms in the world.
A brand that helped attract, in an era of media fragmentation, the biggest TV audience since the Moon landing to this year’s Super Bowl. A brand that is seen by both sides in the US election as a potential difference-maker if she endorses Biden.
The power of paradox lies at the heart of it all. Let’s take a look.
Intimate scale
Swift’s first lesson is how to build a fandom. Her paradox powerplay is to marry unparalleled scale with surprising intimacy.
Take the Eras tour. One of the largest, most lavishly produced music tours of all time, it even registers on the Richter scale: in Seattle, the noise from the sound system and crowd was so loud that it registered as seismic activity.
Taylor’s trick is to also create a sense of strong and intimate connection. She holds marathon meet-and-greets for her Swifties, seeds clues for them about future plans in her music and stages intimate performances on Tumblr and Instagram live.
Our industry is often locked in partisan debates over which model of marketing will enjoy future supremacy: mass or personalised? Taylor shows us there’s no need to choose, we can have our communications cake and eat it by creating intimacy at scale.
The universal in the specific
Lesson two: creating mass emotional impact. In advertising, to engage everyone, we often reach for that trusty technique, the vignette, and hold up a mirror to all sorts of people.
Taylor goes the other way. Her paradoxical path to universal appeal is to double down on the specific.
What might initially seem to be a break-up song will actually be about a specific moment of childhood rejection, or the aftermath of professional betrayal by her manager.
This specificity delivers an emotional hit lacking in much manufactured pop, where songs are written for, not by, an artist.
Advertisers should take from Taylor the confidence to tell specific stories more often.
McDonald’s “Raise your arches” campaign singled out the smallest of moments from within the culture of the brand, a gesture of invitation, and found widespread appeal.
Similarly, John Lewis’ advertising at its historic best (for my money “The long wait”) told a highly specific story to pack a universal emotional punch.
Fresh yet familiar
Last lesson, but not least: how to stay relevant. There’s an old BBH-ism that a brand’s greatest challenge is achieving the paradox of “moving on, without moving off”.
In Miss Americana, the Netflix documentary, Swift explains why she’s so adept at this kind of reinvention – because she’s had to be. Women in pop, she says, need to reinvent themselves far more often than their male counterparts to enjoy similar success.
For brands, this quest for reinvention often prompts a search for a new chief marketing officer and agency. Swift’s success, however, points to the importance of consistent creative guardianship.
As her current tour shows, the disparate eras of her career – from country starlet to pop songstress to confident genre-hopper – are held together by her distinctive songwriting stamp. Each era is fresh, yet familiar.
Back in our world, I’ve seen up close with McDonald’s, and at an admiring distance with Ikea and Nike, the power of consistent, long-term creative guardianship.
It’s a shame it’s so rare, as it allows brand and agency teams to develop the trust and ambition required to move a brand on, without moving it off.
So there you have it. Paradox at play in three different ways, far beyond a mere lyrical device. That’s the Taylor Swift brand-building blueprint.
It’s a formula that has kept millions of fans freshly engaged for decades. It enables them to feel she’s both singing to everyone and to them individually. That they are not just one of a million, but one in a million.
That’s the power of paradox.
Josh Bullmore is chief strategy officer at Leo Burnett UK
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