Five Lessons Experiential Marketers Can Learn From Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

Thursday - December 7 2023, 22:49 UTC - 11 months ago

This article explores five lessons the NFL and other experiential marketers can consider to enhance their brands and reputation based on the romance between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. These lessons include embracing audience expansion, capitalizing on motivations for fandom and understanding the benefits of celebrity crossover.

What happens when you unite the biggest pop star in the world and a two-time Super Bowl champion? A whole lot of excitement, as the romance of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce has shown. But amid all the cheering, canoodling and Instagram flirting, the situation lends some useful insights into marketing – and as an expert in sports marketing, I know that this is a topic worth focusing on. Here are five lessons the NFL and other experiential marketers can consider to enhance their brands and reputation.

1) "Blank Space": Embrace audience expansion .

Great entertainment marketers know how to fill a blank space. And Swift has given the NFL a unique opportunity to expand its appeal to a demographic – young women – that may not have been interested in football before. Swifties, as Swift’s fans are known, are eager to see the pop icon embrace being in love. So whenever she visits a stadium to cheer on her new lover, Kansas City Chiefs star tight end Kelce – which she has done four times in the past two months and may well do again soon – a media frenzy follows.

While serious football fans want the focus to stay on football, the NFL is smart to capitalize on this opportunity. After all, Swift is a mega-popular star: She has more charted songs (212), top-10 hits (42) and No. 1 song debuts (five) on the Billboard Top 100 than any other female musician in history.

The Chiefs remain known for their winning ways and star power, and they’re still drawing – and satisfying – their traditional fans. Yet Swift’s presence has brought a more playful tone to the games. The ordinarily serious Chiefs coach Andy Reid has taken to joking about the pair ("I set them up"), while memes about Swift having to leave the stadium in a popcorn machine are a next-level combination of participatory pop culture, celebrity and sports.

Audience expansion is an effective tactic for businesses, as long as marketers don’t alienate old fans by opening up to new ones. And so far, this is paying off for the NFL: Ratings soar when Swift attends a game, and Kelce jersey sales have also skyrocketed. This new interest in the sport is welcome, especially since NFL television ratings among 18- to 35-year-olds had previously shown some declines.

2) "Wildest Dreams": Capitalize on the many motivations for fandom .

An entertainment or sports marketer’s wildest dream is to be able to bring in all sorts of fans and deliver on their personal reasons for being there. That’s why marketers are wise to think about "psychographics" in addition to demographic appeals. This means that instead of just segmenting audiences by demographic – such as younger women or college students – marketers tailor their appeals to lifestyles, interests, activities and the way consumers think.

My co-authored research shows that engaged sports fans are motivated by psychological desires such as escape and building self-esteem – everyone wants to be associated with a winner – as well as social motives such as wanting to strengthen in-group bonds and participate in traditions and rituals.

Football is known for intense strategies, masculine bravado and violent hits. So the Swift crossover to a typically gentle, softer kind of entertainment is a way to usher in broader meanings of what it means to be a fan. To spectacle-oriented fans, it’s as thrilling to see stars kiss and cuddle as it is to see them pull off a game-winning play.