It’s the hottest ticket of the summer – Taylor Swift’s sixth headlining concert tour, entitled “The Eras Tour.” The 52-date, 20-U.S. city event is Swift’s second all-stadium tour and her first tour since 2018 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This tour takes on a unique approach as Swift is not only promoting her latest album, “Midnights,” but also is diving into her nearly 20-year music career, performing a 44-song set in 10 acts that align conceptually with each of her studio albums, or “eras.”
Steven Chen, marketing professor at Cal State Fullerton, has been watching this latest move by Swift unfold by looking at it through a different paradigm.
“In marketing, we can understand Taylor as a product or a brand as she would be in that ‘mature’ part of the product lifecycle, meaning she’s been around for quite some time,” Chen said.
Chen describes the product lifecycle theory as a theoretical framework used by marketing scholars to prescribe how a company can successfully manage a product or a brand over time.
“When I look at ‘The Eras Tour,’ it struck me because, to me, it’s an indicator that Taylor is, indeed, in that mature part of the product lifecycle in the sense that ‘The Eras Tour’ is a concert event that leverages her entire catalog to date,” Chen said. “And she hits on it 100%. Reading off the setlist, she’s playing the greatest hits of her career thus far. And she’s also adopting a look and an esthetic of those songs when she sings them. She’s really going through this whole progression of her life.”
Chen says that based on history, it is an unusual move for a musical artist to focus on nostalgia while at their peak, as “greatest hits” tours are generally done by artists who are at the stage of their careers where they are leaning on their past.
“She had the luxury because she started, essentially, as a child star,” Chen said. “She’s still relatively young, but she’s been in the game so long. I think Taylor has a lot yet to come.”
With a research background in the domain of product and service design, Chen teaches a number of undergraduate and graduate classes in CSUF’s College of Business and Economics, including courses centered around consumer behavior, visual marketing, product and service design, and marketing management.
Whether he is instructing his millennial MBA students or his Gen Z undergrads, Swift’s latest tour has served as a perfect example this semester for Chen to engage his students and teach the product lifecycle theory.
“Something like product lifecycle can be dry … so you need these ‘sticky’ examples that resonate with the students,” Chen said. “There are a lot of ‘Swifties’ in my classroom. You mention her name, and you see the interest rise a little bit more. You drop this linkage between Taylor and the product lifecycle, and we see it click in their eyes.”
Chen states that another key point to this strategy is the prescription that a company should diversify the product or brand over time to reach different segments of consumers. As an example of a brand that is in maturity, Swift has many different variations or versions of herself that speak to different segments of the market, and she touches on all of those versions in her current tour.
“The way that I see Taylor Swift doing this is no matter what type of Taylor Swift fan you are, whether you like the country version of her when she was a teenager, or whether you like the more rebellious version of her when she was in the ‘Red’ or ‘Reputation’ age, or whether you like the current iteration, there’s something for you,” Chen said. “And that speaks to the heterogeneity of Taylor’s market. Her customers are very diverse with respect to age and reach.”
While Chen currently does not have plans to catch Swift on tour this summer when she lands at SoFi Stadium in August, he said he is fascinated by her current phase and would love to attend so as to view the experience through a scholarly lens.
“She has many fans all around the world, and each one of those different segments of consumers intersected with Taylor in a very different way,” Chen said. “They had a very different launch point with her. In other words, to me, she’s doing exactly what she should be doing if she was a product or a firm.”
Source: Orange County Register
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