By Callum Macrae, Marketing Director at JE Consulting (and unapologetic Swiftie)
Taylor Swift is in the news again – when isn’t she?
On 26 August 2025, she confirmed her engagement to NFL star Travis Kelce with a single Instagram post. The caption?
“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married 💥”.
Cue the internet meltdown.
And the timing? Impeccable.
Hot on the heels of announcing her twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift made a surprise appearance on her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s podcast and in true Swift fashion, broke a record while doing it.
On 26 August, Guinness World Records confirmed that Taylor set a new record for the most live-streamed podcast on YouTube, with 1.3 million concurrent views.
The episode, which premiered 13 days earlier, overtook the previous record held by Donald Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience (800,000 viewers).
The video has since amassed over 22 million views on YouTube.
So, here’s the question:
Is Taylor just lucky? Or is she one of the most strategic brand minds of our time?
Spoiler: it’s the latter. And here’s why.
She doesn’t follow PR rules. She rewrites them.
Swift doesn’t play by traditional PR rules. She doesn’t need to.
Her less is more approach is a masterclass.
Forget traditional PR cycles. Taylor doesn’t need a six-week media plan. She drops hints, not headlines and lets her audience do the rest.
Whether it’s hidden messages in album sleeves or cryptic clues from her record-breaking The Eras Tour, she’s created a culture of curiosity.
Her audience is primed to search, speculate and share.
This is marketing strategy flipped inside out with fans doing the heavy lifting, because she’s made “the hunt” part of the experience.
I’d usually call this a risky approach – give people too little and you lose them.
But with Taylor, it works. Because she’s spent years building that trust and delivering on the payoff.
Every brand wants advocacy. Taylor has an army.
Swifties don’t just share content. They create it. Theories. Montages. Reaction videos. Easter egg breakdowns.
They’ve basically become her outsourced marketing department, and she’s nurtured that culture without ever appearing to directly control it.
One of her boldest and smartest moves was re-recording her old albums after the infamous masters dispute.
Legally, it was about control, but from a brand perspective, it was about empowerment.
She turned a music industry controversy into a rallying cry.
She wasn’t just taking back her music, she was modelling what ownership and autonomy could look like for artists.
It was a mic-drop moment disguised as a business decision.
She’s not the product of a machine, she built the machine.
From limited clues to global impact, Taylor Swift has turned branding into art. She creates mystery, builds momentum and adapts without losing control.
She’s everywhere and every move is hers
From Apple and Target to vinyl variants and surprise drops, Taylor has mastered multi-platform marketing without ever feeling like she’s overexposed.
She’s consistently inconsistent.
She changes mediums, partners, and formats, but never dilutes her identity.
One moment she’s appearing on a podcast, the next, she’s dropping four alternate album covers. She meets her audience wherever they are, but always on her terms.
Whether she’s announcing an album, an engagement, or absolutely nothing at all… we’re all still watching. And if that’s not a marketing masterclass, I don’t know what is.
She’s not the product of a machine. She built the machine. Taylor Swift is a marketing genius.
There. I said it.
If you want to talk branding, why not give JE Consulting a call? Perhaps you have an inner marketing genius too!
