There's Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift

Great look at how Taylor Swift has stayed on top for so long! I’ve been a Taylor Swift fan since her debut in 2006 and at that time I was 11. I also love a business book. I feel like I’ve grown up with her and this book took me on a journey back in time. It made me appreciate her from her business genius—-only solely for her music and how being a Swiftie is an inclusive, fun way, to experience “girlhood”.

An informative analysis with one glaring flaw: After spending so many pages on the controversy around Taylor’s alleged approval of Kanye’s lyrics “I made that bitch famous,” not once does Evers clarify that it was subsequently proven that Taylor was not the liar and that the recorded “evidence” was edited to make her appear to be lying. He does say the recording was edited, but does not clarify or emphasize Taylor’s truthfulness, which is essential to the narrative. If you’re going to analyze Taylor’s strategic genius, you must include her integrity, which is foundational to her identity, not fake.

Published by Harvard Business Review Press, this book is a master class in strategy, product and program development, marketing, customer research, incremental innovation, differentiation, “Blue Ocean strategy,” the reputation-reality gap, and how to recover from a “PR dumpster fire.” (And it has more than 25 references to articles from “Harvard Business Review”—so you can go even deeper.)Yet…it’s also a page-turner that explores the impact and influence of one person—“a strategic genius”—who leverages her songwriting brilliance and artistry to create a new music market niche against all odds and naysayers.Kevin Evers, a senior editor at “Harvard Business Review,” says he wrote this book “with the same respect and framing I’d put to any great innovator, or creative force, or marketing genius, or strategy guru. I saw no reason to treat Taylor Swift’s success any differently than that of any business icon—Jobs or Branson or Bezos or Musk.” And get this: the author credits his wife for the book idea!He admits: “To be sure, Taylor Swift probably isn’t tucking into ‘Harvard Business Review’ for marketing strategy prior to dropping an album or reading the latest innovation literature coming out of B-schools.” He quotes Swift’s humor and transparency at the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Awards when she was honored with the Innovator Award. Swift laughed:“I never a single time woke up in the morning and thought, ‘You know what I’m going to do today? I’m going to innovate some stuff.’”The author’s big idea: to take us on a “chronological romp” through Swift’s career—her missteps, her achievements, her humanity—explaining how she “has managed to find success, sustain it, and scale it multiple times to the absurd heights it’s reached today. To give more shape to that feeling so many fans and admirers have about her—that there really is nothing like it.”I’m highlighting five fascinating insights—but you’ll find 50 (or more):#1. BLIND SPOTS. In 2006, Taylor Swift, at 16, was writing country music songs for other teenagers. Yet the major labels believed “it made sense to avoid teenage female artists. It was Nashville conventional wisdom. It was accepted as gospel. They’d tried that, failed, and possessed anecdotal evidence to back up their claims.” Why risk it?Evers reminds us about the book and the “Harvard Business Review” article by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, “Blue Ocean Strategy.” In a blue ocean, “a previously unknown market space . . . demand is created rather than fought over.” When organizations stick to conventional wisdom, “it can also lead to blind spots,” adds Evers, and “Swift was banking on the idea that Nashville had a blind spot—young women who write their own songs for young women.”#2. DIFFERENTIATION. Evers writes that Taylor Swift was “the queen of her own niche. And she was protecting it.” He adds, “There weren’t other artists her age who were writing their own songs that were tailored for the teen to the young adult country-pop market.”Intuitively, Swift affirmed the business savvy from Chris Zook and James Allen who wrote, “Differentiation is the essence of strategy, the prime source of competitive advantages.” Read their “pioneering” HBR article, “The Great Repeatable Business Model.” They add, “The sharper your differentiation, the greater your advantage.”#3. PREMATURE CORE ABANDONMENT. After Swift’s first album, “Taylor Swift,” in 2006, the obvious question comes—what to do next? But warning! “The path from first to second album is full of dangers. This phenomenon, researched for decades and feared even longer, goes by difference names. Second-album syndrome. The sophomore slump. Or simply: The Slump.”The author notes that Swift followed a business rule-of-thumb strategy called “incremental innovation” for her second album, “Fearless” (a blend of country and pop). Insightfully, Swift and her innovative record company, Big Machine, avoided a common trap called “premature core abandonment.”And yes—the author points us to another fascinating HBR article on this topic, “When Growth Stalls.” Yikes! Read this: “The record shows that if management cannot turn a company around within a few years, the odds are that it will never again see healthy top-line growth.”#4. ADJACENT MARKETS. Should you follow Taylor Swift’s lead and venture into what business leaders call “adjacent markets”—or not? (Was it wise to leave country—and move to pop?) Caution! Kevin Evers points us to Target’s venture into Canada (an adjacent market)—and why they ultimately closed all 133 Canadian stores. Read HBR’s “Why Target's Canadian Expansion Failed,” by Denise Dahlhoff.#5. TAYLOR SWIFT—THE START-UP! “If Taylor Swift were a startup—and in many ways that’s what a music career is—by 2011 she had become a unicorn” (per the term used by venture capitalists). And this is LOL-funny:According to the author, an investor pitching “SwiftCo” would spotlight the following:• Three multiplatinum albums in a row.• “Brand equity was high.”• They would gush about her “product-market fit—she grew revenue while gaining new customers at a very low cost, through a canny go-to-market strategy that leveraged social media promotion and direct engagement with customer to surprise and delight them.” Evers adds, “This is really how they talk.” (LOL!)MUSIC TO YOUR EARS (and bottom line). I won’t spoil the lifelong-learning journey for you—because you’ll want to read this book. But I’m betting there are several key people on your team that will absolutely love this book and annoy you with quotes and innovative ideas for the next six months. This well-researched book—with a very human touch—is amazingly relevant to your organization or company. And…it’s so well-written with wonderfully creative word choices popping up to “surprise and delight” us! (How could it not be? It’s about a creative juggernaut!)MORE INSIGHTS:• Taylor Swift’s disruptive innovation per Harvard prof Clayton Christensen’s job-to-be-done theory. (Read HBR’s “Know Your Customers’ ‘Jobs to Be Done.’”)• Why “productive paranoia” served Swift well and why it will serve you well. (Read HBR’s “Three Leadership Skills That Count,” by Morton Hansen.)• What Evers translates as “management speak for staying relevant by changing,” he discusses how “positive shocks—sudden breaks from successful collaborations” may jump-start your creativity for your next big project. According to the Academy of Management Journal, “The idea is that a stable network of collaborators is a good thing until it’s not.”• Why Elvis Costello (supposedly) said, “You have twenty years to write your first album and you have six months to write your second one.”• How Seth Godin’s marketing savvy aligns with Taylor Swift’s prioritization of her customers/fans.• Why most reinventions fail. See John Kotter’s HBR article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.” He lists eight phases—with each “phase beset with potential pitfalls.”I’ve mentioned just a few of the more than 25 references to great lifelong learning from the articles Evers notes from “Harvard Business Review.” This is a brilliant book that shines a light on critical management and marketing principles (behind-the-scenes) that helped fuel this stunning entrepreneurial genius. (And thanks to Harvard Business Review Press for sending me a review copy.)

A pretty good dive into the strategic thinking of Taylor Swift but it ignores several elements of what has made her so successful. It rushes through her biggest successes over the last 2 years which took her to an unprecedented level, and ignores some of the achievements that have made her unique. As an example, her earlier records and Grammy awards are discussed but there is no mention of her later, historic wins for album of the year, which seems like a strange thing to skip after focusing on it in earlier years. Her directing, gets a very brief mention other than the All Too Well short, which seems dismissive of what has earned accolades and could in the future become an even bigger focus in the future. The writer also ignores one of the biggest contributors to her success, her family dynamic and does not mention at all that she manages her own empire. As an analysis of her business strategy, it seems odd that he did not dive into 13 Management at all although he compares her choices to those of major corporations, he skips the management company she created and how impactful that has been for the careful curation of her career. Clearly he was not given any access to her team so his research is based on previous interviews, articles and chart data. An interesting read that left me wanting much more.