Why Shared Experiences Create Brand Loyalty: The Taylor Swift Marketing Lesson Every Leader Needs

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Welcome, or welcome back! Each month, I cut through the marketing noise to bring you real talk from other leaders, what’s actually worth reading, and the occasional hot take that makes you think.

In today’s newsletter:

🚀 Quick Ask: Launch Strategy Survey I'm surveying marketing leaders about their biggest launch challenges. Take the 2-minute survey and get first access to the insights and see how your launch experiences compare. Survey closes soon.

When's the last time your customers spent money without knowing what they were buying?

I did that this week. I, along with millions of others, spent $15M on a pre-sale for “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl.” All we know is it’s an 89-minute in-theater experience with some behind-the-scenes content, her new music video, and the lyric videos for her new songs. It’s likely that all this content will also stream for free on YouTube and will no doubt be pirated on TikTok. But here we are, millions of Swifties and $15M later, paying for a vague, limited-time, in-person experience.

It’s the ultimate sign of brand loyalty: trusting a brand enough to purchase something without fully knowing what to expect. Consumers are craving community, and Taylor has tapped into exactly what her audience is looking for right now: a communal experience with like-minded individuals.

And it’s not just Taylor that can use this as an opportunity to create deeper brand loyalty. This shift from large-scale events to intimate gatherings isn't just happening in entertainment—it's a blueprint every marketer should study.

Why Community Beats Crowds

We’ve been fully in the post-COVID shift to IRL for a while now. But we’ve moved from a desire for just any IRL experience to the need to create a connection with people who share our interests and our values. The growth of third places where people can form bonds in familiar public spots, and even “fourth spaces” where Gen Z looks to bring their online interests into meaningful real-world connections and self-discovery, shows the desire for smaller, more like-minded community gathering opportunities.

The opportunity for marketing leaders? Shift to community-driven engagement.

Think small, high-touch engagements instead of large and low-touch. While a large, 10K-person user conference where everyone flies to one location may provide scale, a smaller, more intimate and local event can create deeper, more meaningful engagement among attendees. You’re essentially creating a third space (or fourth space, there are so many spaces) where your brand becomes the shared interest, bringing a group together, creating a deeper connection, a higher likelihood for conversion, and ongoing brand loyalty.

You may be thinking, “But Jodi—Taylor sold $15M not because people wanted community, but because they wanted her content!” Yes, Taylor creates unique demand no matter what she’s offering. But what’s different here is the experience she’s creating in addition to her content. She could have launched this release party as a direct-to-streaming rental like she did with The Eras Tour movie. Instead, Taylor is deliberately creating in-person communal opportunities around a shared experience. Shared experiences create deeper, more meaningful bonds and connections among individuals, thereby creating more brand loyalty and engagement with what brought them together.

How might your brand use small-scale community engagement instead of large-scale crowds to launch new content?

Here’s where I’ll share what I’ve found worthwhile among the myriad newsletters, podcasts, and open tabs across my devices lately. No fluff, just the good stuff.

⚙️ How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT: The New SEO Playbook: 90% of B2B buyers now use AI search engines, but only 11% of citations overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity—making traditional SEO obsolete. The new SEO requires hyper-specific content, Reddit mentions, and a shift to tables.

tl;dr: SEO content was never meant to help buyers; it existed to game the search system. AI is a totally new game, with new rules that change daily. Just like social algorithms change on a whim, AI algorithms will likely change by the time you’ve followed the new playbook, so proceed carefully.

🛠 Why Direct Mail Still Delivers: If you thought small, community-driven engagement was a contrarian marketing strategy, wait til you read this MIT Sloan piece on the resurgence of Direct Mail. It’s “not merely a reaction to digital saturation; it reflects an understanding of how tactile experiences break through the noise.”

tl;dr: In another win for IRL over URLs, direct mail now delivers higher engagement and ROI than digital advertising. While consumer brands like J. Crew and Warby Parky are highlighted for how they use new attribution methods to tie physical mail to online behaviors, there’s whitespace for B2B marketers to learn from B2C and reignite some classic direct mail campaigns as another small-scale, high-touch engagement strategy.

🍿 Pop Culture Mondays: Every Monday, PR pro Brooke Hammerling’s newsletter PCM covers all the viral moments that happened that week on social media and beyond. She explains what they mean and where they come from in an effort to keep everyone up to date on the latest. Last week’s for example, had everything from Charlie Kirk commentary to the Bedtime Snacktime lady, to Bad Bunny’s new line of Labubus.

tl;dr: I firmly believe all marketers need to stay current on pop culture to stay relevant. Whether that means hopping on a meme trend or finding inspiration from the latest fad, marketers can’t live under a rock. As tuned-in as I am to TikTok, Brooke’s newsletter always shares something new that’s not on my FYP, and I love her professional PR-POV on the trends.

A bit of my own writing, recent engagements, client updates, and things I’m doing.

📹 Mr.Beast Meets B2B SaaS “I want to create a viral, amazing race-style YouTube video for our cybersecurity customers, and I want to replicate how Mr. Beast makes content.”

My first shareable client project is live, and it’s the most fun I’ve had at work in a while. I produced the Floppy Disk Cyber Challenge for Splunk, working alongside the Splunk team and 2nd Peninsula Productions to create a cybersecurity-themed adventure that’s Survivor meets Amazing Race in Boston Common. Check it out below to see what a floppy disk and Paul Revere have in common!

🚀 Does anyone like their launch strategy? I'm surveying marketing leaders about their biggest launch challenges. Take the quick anonymous survey and get first access to the aggregated results to see how your struggles compare to other CMOs

This isn't just research—it's your chance to see how your launch experiences compare to other marketing leaders.

I'll be sharing the most common launch challenges and what's actually working in an upcoming newsletter.

Your marketing team is stretched thin, launches feel chaotic, and you're not sure if your messaging actually resonates. You need strategic leadership but can't justify a full-time hire.

Sound familiar? I work with marketing leaders who need seasoned product marketing expertise on their highest-impact initiatives—bringing enterprise experience with startup speed.

Workshops and Keynote Speaking: Who doesn’t love interactive workshops and inspirational keynotes? I bring topics related to marketing and storytelling to your events, off-sites, and experiences.

Perfect for: Marketing teams, sales teams, or leadership groups who want to improve how they communicate stories and complex ideas.

Team Capacity & Capability Building: You know what good marketing looks like, but you're hitting bottlenecks in execution. I step in as an extension of your leadership team to provide strategic reviews, coaching, advisory support, and framework development that scale your team’s impact and make the most of your time.

Perfect for: Marketing teams that need senior-level strategic advising and coaching without long hiring timelines.

Fractional PMM Leadership: I help get things done, without the overhead of a full-time senior hire. Whether you need messaging frameworks, go-to-market support, or a new product launch strategy, I work alongside your team to execute, not just advise.

Perfect for: CMOs and marketing SVPs who need strategic marketing execution and leadership support, but don't have the bandwidth or budget for senior full-time talent.

Many of you are hiring, and I know a lot of talented PMMs who are looking. So I started a site to connect great talent with great leaders.

Have a role you’re hiring for? Send it my way and I’ll get it on the site!

Jodi