What would Taylor do?
She's a financial powerhouse. She caused actual seismic activity in Scotland last weekend. There's a few lessons in that.
Last weekend, over three very exciting days, 220,000 people went to the Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh to watch Taylor Swift perform. They took trains, buses, planes and trams to get here. They filled the hotels and the few Airbnbs that have managed to get one of the city’s new licenses. They ate burgers and curly fries during the performance. They bought pink cowboy hats and sequinned T shirts. A large number of them forked out £60 on a sweatshirt. Overall they brought an estimated £200m into the city. And if Taylor Swift had played another three nights they’ve had handed over another £200m. She’s a financial powerhouse. You can make endless lists of what makes her so popular - her charisma, the extravagance of the show or perhaps even the music. But it is also worth thinking about what she does not do. Taylor Swift does not get involved in the trans debate. She has not endorsed a political candidate in this election in the US. She never mentions climate change. She does not comment on the endless criticism of her private jet use - beyond a few vague comments from her publicists about carbon offsets. The anxiety she expresses in her music is not about a burning planet or the extent to which she is an ally of the gender confused but about being let down a little by the odd boyfriends. Taylor Swift isn’t about throwing soup over the Magna Carta (instead she gave a large but undisclosed amount to one of Edinburgh’s foodbank charities before she left) or using anything except her product to promote herself. She’s about helping a lot of people have a whole lot of fun. She’s wholesome. She’s normal. She’s non political. She’s entrepreneurial. And she’s fronting a multi million pound business that offends pretty much no one (I’m not counting the boyfriends in the songs). She also does not rip her customers off. If you got a ticket when they were first sold in the UK you anywhere from £60 to £600. Expensive tickets got better seats and included merch. Cheaper tickets came with occasionally restricted views and the right to queue for merch. She could have charged more than she did for every single ticket sold – we know this because we can see how much people are prepred to pay for them in the secondary market. As a result of all this pretty much everyone loves her. So much so that the dancing to her top tunes made the earth move: British Geographical Survey monitoring stations detected seismic activity from nearly 4 miles away.
There’s a lot for others to learn from this. Too many companies have spent the long low interest years losing their way little – talking DEI, ESG and purpose instead of focusing on their core businesses. Remember fund manager Terry Smith on the matter? Mayonnaise does not need a purpose beyond tasting nice in sandwiches, he said in a letter to investors a few years ago. And anyone who feels it does “has lost the plot.” He had a point. One Swift seems to get and everyone else is beginning to get again. Fund managers might take note too. ESG was a brilliant marketing tool - but it the marketing was not followed by performance. They might have been better to focus less on selling funds and more on managing them well (good performance sells itself as any Edinburgh teen could tell you…). A column from a few months ago on the matter of companies pulling back from DEI and ESG is below. But the key lesson here might be a simple one. Those who run a business of any kind and want to use that business to feel good about themselves, to virtue signal or to adopt “woke” causes for marketing purposes, should maybe ask what Taylor would do? Then they might focus on doing one thing really well, making money for their shareholders and themselves – and then, should they be so inclined, quietly giving some of that money to a local food bank.