Taylor Swift

Audience study

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift is a global pop megastar worth over $200 million, according to Forbes.

She was included in Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010 and 2015.

She has won 10 Grammy awards.

Feminism

Taylor Swift has openly talked about her thoughts on feminism and women in the music industry. In particular, she has defended herself against slut-shaming and negative comments from the media and her long time rival, Katy Perry.

She promoted the Every Woman Counts campaign in 2008 during the presidential elections to encourage women to get more interested in politics.

The way that Taylor talks about feminism encourages her fans to become aware of feminism instead of seeing it in a negative light. This can be related to our artist GiGi, who wants to send a message to her young audience that they should be independent and defy gender roles.

Taylor Swift's Squad

Taylor Swift has a circle of close-knit girl friends called her "Squad". Most of them are successful models, actors and singers.

She has featured members of her squad in the music video for her hit single "Bad Blood" in which Taylor subtly makes reference to the bad blood between her and Katy Perry.

The girls are always supporting each other and are a good example of girl power, setting a good example for young girls.

Audience

Data from Quantcast shows that out of the people that visit her website;

This suggests that the typical fan is a young white female, which is similar to GiGi's target audience. I think that this could be useful to my project because we can use techniques that Taylor uses to reach and appeal to her target audience with respect to GiGi.

67% are female, 33% are male

44% are in the 18-24 age range,
35% are in the 25-34 age range,
21% other

49% are Caucasian,
22% are Asian,
17% are Hispanic,
8% are African,
​4% other

Primary and secondary audience

Taylor's primary audience would consist of her fans who are dedicated to following and supporting her by buying the albums and going to the concerts.

Her secondary audience would be fans of mainstream pop. As an artist with charting songs that are clean and relateable to a wide range of audiences, people who listen to mainstream pop are likely to stream her music.

Knowing Taylor Swift's audience and how she appeals to them will help me market my artist to a similar target audience.

Swifties

Taylor Swift has a very close connection with her fans and she is able to communicate with them in ways that most pop stars do not.

She invited 90 of her fans to her apartment in New York to eat pizza play with her cats.

This enables her fans to connect with Taylor on a deep and personal level that goes way beyond the typical relations that fans build with their idol. To fans, Taylor is their close friend and vice versa.

Taylor and GiGi

The way that Taylor interacts with her audience has largely influenced my decisions when it came to how I wanted to connect with GiGi's audience. For example, I was inspired by Taylor's way of meeting her fans and decided to involve a prize draw for a fan to enter into to meet GiGi.

Despite Taylor being an established pop star, I have been able to apply strategies that she uses to GiGi's marketing campaign for her upcoming debut album. This case study was important to my understanding of how we can best appeal to our target audience of young teenagers who are fans of the pop genre and may be interested in female empowerment.