Martin Kihn

Note: This article was drafted for my employers’ blog but never quite made it for various reasons; I present it for your private enjoyment. ed.

When you’re choosing a customer data platform, should you strap on the tool belt and go DIY or look for a full-featured solution? We’ll explain the difference and help you decide.

Composable customer data platform (CDP) is a term that puzzles a lot of mar-tech buyers. What does it mean? Is a composable CDP truly a new invention, just clever marketing, or something in between? Let’s break it down – and figure out what kind of CDP is right for you.

Currently, you’ve got two major CDP options to help you store and organize your customer data: full-featured or composable. What’s the difference? Adopting a full-featured CDP is like having furniture delivered to your home; a composable CDP is more like getting the kind of furniture you assemble yourself.

You can use full-featured CDPs to access data from key sources, harmonize it, manage identity, build and activate audiences for marketing, service and more. Composable solutions claim to provide a flexible architecture that can be adapted to your business requirements.

The good news is that you can combine the benefits of full-featured CDPs and composability without compromising on features or flexibility. 

For example, you can maintain a modern cloud data warehouse and still have push-button access to customer relationship management (CRM) data, as well as all the features you require for CDP use cases, without having to select and maintain a portfolio of applications.

How can you do this?

Short answer: adopt a full-featured CDP that has composable benefits like modularity.

Longer answer: in this blog post, I’ll review what composability offers and the requirements for a full-featured CDP. Then we’ll talk about how to get the best of both.

But first, let’s define what a composable CDP is and how it differs from a full-featured CDP.

• What is a composable CDP and how does it work?
• What is a full-featured CDP and how does it work?
• Full-featured or composable CDP: Which is better for customer experience?
• Can a full-featured CDP be composable?

What is a composable CDP and how does it work?

A composable CDP runs on a data warehouse and requires users to assemble the features they would like to include, much like building blocks. Components that the CDP does not offer (such as advanced identity management) can be supplied by other vendors. It is common for composable CDPs to have multiple vendors co-existing in the end solution, each performing different functions.

Composability is a concept in software design, and it’s widely used. For example, Wix helps customers build websites from different pieces – that’s composable. Data scientists rely on packaged libraries of functions that plug into Python and R — that’s composable. 

When thinking about a composable CDP vs. a full-featured CDP, it’s important to keep in mind that composability is an architecture, not a product.

What does composability mean for CDPs? To gain the benefits of composability, you need to look for a CDP that’s built using an architectural approach that supports modularity. It needs to be flexible, with robust application programming interfaces (APIs), and a lot of options for configuration and use case support.

The advantage of a full-featured CDP like Salesforce Data Cloud built using composable principles is it gives customers a wider range of options for implementation and deployment. I know customers of Salesforce Data Cloud who do their own identity management in a homegrown solution, relying on the CDP for segmentation and activation.

The same kind of modularity helps customers who want to do their own segmentation and audience-building, say, rather than using the CDP’s built-in tools.

What is a full-featured CDP and how does it work?

A full-featured CDP is a tool designed to organize customer data from different sources and provide an up-to-date, unified view of each customer. Unlike composable CDPs, full-featured CDPs contain all the CDP capabilities in a single product, including data ingestion, modeling, identity management and segmentation.

Full-featured CDPs arose to fill a need in the market: combining disparate data to create a connected customer experience across marketing, service, sales, commerce, and beyond. They also provide a great foundation for emerging generative AI applications.

That’s why there’s so much investment and innovation in the full-featured (also known as packaged) CDP sector. According to the analyst firm IDC, the packaged CDP market is expected to surpass $5.7 billion by 2026, growing about 18% per year.

As is natural in a fast-moving sector, misconceptions arise. I am happy to report they are nothing to worry about:

• Full-featured CDPs are not “legacy” systems
• They do not create another customer data silo

Full-featured CDPs are far from being last generation’s technology. On the contrary, full-featured CDPs like Salesforce Data Cloud are built using cloud architectures that avoid the challenges of legacy databases, both in speed and data requirements.

And saying that CDPs create yet another silo is kind of like saying the Google search engine creates just another website. Rather, full-featured CDPs take siloed data and make it available to the business. It’s the key to your customer data, not the lock. And some full-featured CDPs such as Salesforce Data Cloud provide access to data in data warehouses like Snowflake without copying.

“QUOTE TBDThe full-featured CDP “enables companies to smoothly unite their data, driving better customer insights and experiences. It’s shaping the future of data and AI-driven success,” said Rahul Auradkar, executive vice president and general manager of unified data services & Einstein at Salesforce. 

Full-featured or composable CDP: Which is better for customer experience?

Full-featured CDPs, unlike composable CDPs, have certain capabilities that make them foundational for a more connected customer experience. For example, when a major international racing organization needed to develop profiles of their 500 million fans around the world and connect with customers across channels like mobile, the web and advertising, they needed all the features of Salesforce Data Cloud.

Our customers tell us that CDPs – at minimum – need to be able to do at least five things:

1. Access data easily from sources like websites and warehouses
2. Harmonize the data so it’s consistent
3. Handle identity management
4. Create and explore segments and audiences
5. Activate audiences to channels like email, advertising, call centers, etc.

Which brings us to a challenge of composability: it’s not a set of features. So I always recommend that any technology buyer be absolutely sure that any product calling itself a composable CDP can do all the things that a good CDP does. That’s just common sense.

Companies that decide to go the do-it-yourself composable CDP route often find themselves taking on more technical overhead than they anticipated. They may have to implement and manage multiple tools from multiple vendors, without a common user interface or service-level agreements. The requirements for ongoing maintenance can be significant.

Another characteristic of full-featured CDPs is that they are generally designed to be business user-friendly, using clicks, not code. This distinguishes them from legacy tools and some warehouses that require a more technical user, raising talent and training costs.

Can a full-featured CDP be composable?

Luckily, a requirement of full-featured CDPs is not that you have to settle for a partial solution. It is possible to work with a CDP that’s also composable in principle — that combines a full CDP feature set with the added flexibility of a composable architecture.

One way to think about the different types of CDPs is to compare their different approaches to standard CDP capabilities, such as data ingestion and analytics. In general, cloud warehouses and vendors of so-called reverse-ETLs target a more technical, do-it-yourself user.

Of course, there’s more to composability than just the CDP. Profile data should sit within the context of an enterprise architecture that enables you to build a more connected customer experience across your entire enterprise — from advertising through conversion, loyalty, service, win-back and more.

This more ambitious approach requires real flexibility at the platform level.

For example, Salesforce Data Cloud is built on the Salesforce core platform, which is metadata-driven and highly configurable. And it all sits on top of Hyperforce, our multi-substrate cloud infrastructure that provides trust, scale and governance capabilities across the enterprise (not available in all geographies).

Win-Win for the CDP Buyer

Composability is a great principle and we embrace it in our technical designs. 

So it makes a lot of sense to ensure any full-featured CDP you’re considering has the flexibility and modularity advantages that you might find in a composable CDP.

It also makes sense to scrutinize any product – whether it’s called “composable” or not – to make sure it’s going to do what you need it to do. In the case of CDPs, your requirements likely include data access, identity management, analytical workflows, and activation.

Believe it or not, it is now possible to have your data layer and consume it too.

We all know TED. Over 1,800 (available) 12-18 minute talks over 34 years. We know the format: conversational, casual dress, few images, a bare stage, a Big Idea.

There’s more. There are no devices allowed in the TED room. That’s why people pay attention.

And it turns out, they have a structure. I’ve made a hobby of Hollywood form, and there’s also TED form.

THE 2-3 WORD CALL TO ACTION

Of course, I’m not the first to notice this. There are dozens of blogs on how to nail your TED Talk, and like most blogs these are written too fast: embrace mystery and wonder … start and end strong … be yourself … and so on …

More useful — if rather twistingly meta — are some TED Talks on how to give a TED Talk. These get us closer to it.

* June Cohen (a TED producer) emphasizes keeping your personal story in the center, not rushing and staying non-technical

* Gordon Kangas stresses that you want to change the audience: inspire them to do something

* TEDx’s own how-to-give-a-TEDx pounds on the call to action at the end.

TED Talks aren’t meant to inform or entertain so much as inspire action. This is the existential difference between a TED Talk and a corporate speech. Perhaps it should not be.

Think about two of the more memorable TED Talks, ones you’ve heard even if you haven’t, if you follow me. Brene Brown on vulnerability and Amy Cuddy on the “power pose.”

They both had a simple message that could be:

• Summarized in 2-3 words
• Inspire positive action

That is:

• Brown: “Be Vulnerable!”
• Cuddy: “Stand with Power!”

Imagine casting your corporate talks as 2-3 word action statements. Would it work? How could it?

This leads me to the three reasons I think the TED Talk format is so durable:

1. They are short
2. They don’t use slides
3. They are more pep talk than lecture

THE SECRET RULE OF SEVEN

So I watched a bunch of popular TED Talks and sketched out their structure. There are seven parts. (I’m being reductive here, since there is variety in 35,000 global multi-lingual talks; but you’ll get the gist.)

These are:

1. PERSONAL ANECDOTE – start with a personal story that expresses, yes, vulnerability and makes you seem human
2. STARTLING FACT – make a startling statement that is true but not widely known (e.g., “If you eat a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, you will immediately gain half a pound” – true)
3. BIG IDEA – this is up to you, amigo
4. ARGUMENT – present your case in a logical sequence, structure as 3-4 mini challenge-solution narratives – i.e., present a challenge … a solution … another challenge … a solution … rising and falling like Freytag’s pyramid
5. “IN CONCLUSION …” – summarize what you just said, quickly
6. HOPEFUL FUTURE – describe a beautiful vision of a better tomorrow if only we could all do something … but what?!
7. CALL TO ACTION! – one thing you want to inspire the people to do

The key here being to inspire. People aren’t amused into action. They aren’t informed into action. They are inspired. The rest is up to you.

See you back stage at TED.

It has been 14 years since a little-known Utah State University professor named Stephen R. Covey published “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” which went on to sell 25 million copies and become the gold standard of the self-help genre. It is hardly Covey’s fault that his habits now sound like common sense, including advice to “be proactive,” “begin with the end in mind,” “think win-win” and “sharpen the saw” (that is, keep improving).

But as earlier self-help guru Dale Carnegie said, “The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” In that spirit, and inspired by Covey’s own list, we suggest seven common marketing practices to avoid.

No. 1: “Bias for Research”

Ineffective habit: “Don’t make a move unless it has been validated and revalidated with primary, secondary and tertiary research. Discount hypotheses. Move methodically down internal pathways. Don’t field anything without unanimous buy-in.”

Consider Apple, whose founder Steve Jobs famously said, “We do no market research.” Jobs preferred to rely on the wisdom of his team, believing that consumers could not predict their own needs. Contrast arch-rival Microsoft, known to do extensive research before launching a product, such as the Windows Phone. Gartner estimates Apple’s share of the worldwide mobile phone market is 14.2% versus 3.3% for Microsoft.

Or take the case of television advertising campaigns, routinely subject to extensive copy testing before and after launch. Multiple studies have shown that the correlation between advertising pretesting and in-market results is weak and even negative. The U.K.’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) concluded, “Ads which get favourable pre-test results actually do worse than ads which didn’t.”

Why? Some answers were brought to the surface 40 years ago by Alan Hedges in his classic “Testing to Destruction.” Hedges argued that market research often forces people to construct rational justifications for irrational decisions, happens too late in the development process, and takes place under artificial conditions.

How to break this habit: Hedges’ answer, which still rings true, is not to avoid testing altogether, but to use it judiciously, with full knowledge of its limitations.

No. 2: “Always Be Closing”

Ineffective habit: “Treat every customer as a target. Do what it takes to convert. Pelt them with promotions and pop-ups. Make them register for access to anything. Put prominent links on your videos. Don’t waste time getting to know them too well. Pull out a contract at ‘hello.’ Practice ‘sign and dash.'”

An oily salesman in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross” spells out the mantra of “A-B-C,” as in: “A[1]always, B-be, C-closing.” Unfortunately for him, there is evidence that, unless you’re willing to be a perennial down-market discounter (“Everything on sale, all the time!”), strong-arm tactics undermine consumers’ perceptions of your value and the meaning of your brand.

One study showed that using an aggressive “closing technique” on prospects may increase one-off sales but tends to diminish trust, lowering the long-term value of the relationship.5 Trust in sales, marketing and advertising has been falling anyway over the past five years. For example, Nielsen’s latest “Trust in Advertising” report showed that 53% of people globally “don’t trust” television advertising, and 67% say the same of online advertising.

How to break this habit: It turns out that the solution to diminished trust is what people have been telling their significant others for years: Just listen. A different study on “perceived salesperson listening behavior” showed that, if people believe a salesperson is paying close attention to them, the result is “greater anticipation of future interaction.” Listening principles can effectively be applied in a digital context.7 Start with trigger-based CRM, adaptive site experiences and active social monitoring.

No. 3: “Begin at the Beginning”

Ineffective habit: “Who doesn’t like a surprise? When designing your marketing strategy, start with Wired magazine’s “What’s Hot” column. Do the same tomorrow. Put out fires. Focus all your attention on pain points, and don’t worry where you’re going. You’ll get there.”

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the forces that cause us to drift toward obesity, insolvency or this-quarter business strategies. He calls them “present-bias focus,” a mental cost-benefit analysis that tells us a Sno Ball now is worth more than long-term health. We are inherently irrational, he says, and “the basic essence is the trade-off between the short term and the long term.”

Increasingly impatient shareholders aren’t helping. In a recent McKinsey & Co. study, 63% of executives surveyed said pressure to produce short-term results is increasing. However, a study sponsored by Europe’s Insead showed that this pressure often results in gaining short-term market share at the expense of long-term competitive position.

How to break this habit: Stephen Covey’s idea to “begin with the end in mind” was not a call to mindless optimism. It is a call to focus on long-term outcomes. And it anticipated recent studies showing that the best antidote to both short-term thinking and long-term overconfidence is a realistic, detailed anticipation of likely challenges and how to address them. Successful athletes visualize the race itself, not just the winner’s podium.

No. 4: “Fire the Know-It-Alls”

Ineffective habit: “People who know a lot about a certain subject can be opinionated and difficult. Who needs that? There is no ‘Ph.D.’ in team. Expertise is expendable. The smartest person in the room is the youngest. Why? Because he gets it. What’s ‘it,’ exactly? Nobody knows.”

Perhaps because of its relative youth as a discipline, digital marketing has a predilection for youth. Younger people are assumed to be more adept by virtue of their age — and, by implication, older workers’ digital skills are suspect. Although proof is hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests that marketing department layoffs hit older workers harder, and organizations may have a hidden motive to perpetuate the cult of youth: Young people are usually less expensive.

Skills are skills, of course, and youngsters can be extraordinarily adept. But evidence shows that there is no inherent advantage to being young in the workplace. Studies have shown that age is not well-correlated with job performance or creativity. And other studies show that the number of years of higher education and job experience a person has are positively correlated with strong performance appraisals, and negatively correlated with unproductive behaviors, such as absenteeism and substance abuse. Moreover, experienced marketers have the advantage of having seen trends and markets rise and fall, leading to a healthy skepticism.

How to break this habit: As one metastudy from Oregon Health & Science University concludes: “There is more variability in work performance within age groups than between age groups.” So the solution to this bad habit is to focus on the person, not the person’s age.

No. 5: “Repeat Yourself”

Ineffective habit: “What works best is what worked best. Whatever the product, service, channel, technique, creative or execution — if it worked before, it can work again. Refresh, don’t revise. You know what you know, and that’s all you know. You know?”

The business boneyard is littered with companies that held on to a winning formula well after it had wilted. IBM clung to mainframes, Kodak resisted digitization, Dell was late to the mobile millennium. As Microsoft’s Bill Gates observed, no leader in one technology era has gone on to lead in the next. “Success is a lousy teacher,” he says. “It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

Consider Jill Barad, who tried to promote educational software at Mattel using the same techniques that worked so well for Barbie dolls. The results disappointed in part because software has very different marketing dynamics than dolls. Likewise, many U.S. automotive manufacturers clung to higher-margin trucks and SUVs late into the first decade of this century, even as the consumer scaled back.

How to break this habit: The secret to breaking this habit is not knee-jerk innovation but an unsparing analysis of market dynamics. Studies of the impact of innovation per se are ambiguous, showing (not very helpfully) that it works when it works. As Clayton Christensen argued in “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” few companies want to disrupt their own businesses. Winners are those, like Netflix, that are willing to undermine a dying market (DVDs by mail) to capture one that’s emerging (streaming entertainment) — that are willing to reinvent themselves on the fly.

No. 6: “Ask ‘What Would Google Do?'”

Ineffective habit: “Best practices are best — that’s why they’re called best practices. Apple and Google do everything right. No matter what business you are in, ask yourself, ‘What would [big popular company] do?’ Example: ‘How would Google groom dogs?'”

Not long ago, a digital marketing strategist found himself experiencing an eerie sense of deja vu. He had a meeting with a major airline about its e-commerce strategy, and the airline’s chief marketing officer said, “We need to become the Google of airlines.” Later that week, the strategist was meeting with a consumer packaged goods company, whose digital marketing lead asked, rhetorically, “How do we become the Google of breakfast cereals?”

These true stories highlight a common marketer’s mistake: assuming success can be dragged and dropped from one context (and industry) to another. Great companies surely have a lot to teach. Apple’s design aesthetic is something that designers are crazy not to study. But companies become great because their products and marketing exhibit their truth, not somebody else’s.

How to break this habit: The way out of this trap is to answer a question that is much harder than “What would [hot brand] do?” Namely: “What would my brand do?”

No. 7: “Think Win-Lose”

Ineffective habit: “Marketing is a zero-sum game. There are winners and losers. You know which one you want to be. It’s not complicated. Play to win. Bad-mouth competitors, and ‘borrow’ their ideas. Extract every cent from customers. Be cheap.”

Business is ablaze with sports metaphors, telling us to crush the competition and go for the gold. In the words of a Nike television commercial that aired during the Olympics, “You don’t win silver, you lose gold.” What can be forgotten in the hyperbole is that sports is actually a highly cooperative endeavor. If teams did not agree to abide by a lot of nit-picky rules, the game itself would cease to exist.

Economists studying game theory problems, such as the well-known “prisoner’s dilemma,” tell us that the most effective strategy — the one most in each player’s self-interest — is to be consistent, transparent and reliable. Economist Robert Axelrod describes such behavior as “the evolution of cooperation.” Today’s marketer lives in an increasingly engagement-intensive, always-on environment, in which customers are nurtured over time, and partnerships, such as co-branded media, are increasingly common. There is one important caveat. Cooperation is important only in games — or relationships — that are intended to last. “Winner take all” is a short-term strategy.

How to break this habit: You are welcome to think in terms of winning and losing when negotiating with customers, suppliers, vendors, consultants and agencies. Just make sure you’re not planning to do business with them again.

A version of this purr-fect article originally appeared in The Drum on Feb. 13, 2023, a few days after Super Bowl LVII aired. A picture of my photogenic muse Jerry appeared at the end (as it does below).

While some people say the Super Bowl was a close game, it really wasn’t. Dogs totally dominated cats in the USA Today AdMeter poll.

The Farmer’s Dog came in first with a time-travel tail – uh, tale – that showed just how good dogs are at nuzzling our emotions. Amazon’s bad-dog-turned-angel saga took third.

And where were all the spokescats? Not feline the love. One provided a whisker of comic relief in a Google Pixel ad, where a sour puss pointedly removes a dog from a photo with AI. Probably out of jealously.

It turns out, there’s a good reason for the double-standard. Cats and dogs evoke different emotions in people and can be used to inspire specific actions in marketing.

• Dog actors actually inspire us to make connections, take risks, and share our personal space
• Cat actors put us in mind to purr-chase more insurance, protect our homes and families, and prep for doomsday

So says a first-of-its-kind study which tries to quantify the impact of cat and dog talent on consumer behavior.

Dogs Say YOLO, Cats Say YOWL

Half of U.S. households have a dog and one-third have a cat – a number that continues to grow. One in five households even found a new furry friend to rescue them during lockdown.

And we are big spenders, not just on our pets. Pet owners tend to be more affluent, healthier, more confident, even better-looking (meow).

Pets appear often in entertainment, from Puss in Boots to every perfect-family-with-an-SUV TV spot, especially if it’s in the snow (cue adorable baby Bernese mountain dog). But the impact of our four-footed friends on our attitudes and behaviors hasn’t really been clawed over until recently.

The current study – a collaboration among universities in the U.S. and Hong Kong – wasn’t yet another meme about cat-people vs dog-people. It showed that dogs and cats actually evoke a chain of emotions in most consumers that is both different and predictable. They prime the message pump.

For decades now, many researchers have adopted an idea called regulatory focus theory, which claims there are two basic consumer mindsets:

• Promotion – focusing on gains, success, YOLO, being all that we can be
• Prevention – focusing on safety, preserving what we have, personal security, avoiding risks

Now we consumers aren’t all one or the other – except in the case of some fussy outliers – but have a mindset that can be shifted by social cues and marketing messages … which brings us to pets.

”This stream of research suggests that a promotion-oriented eagerness system better captures dogs’ temperaments and behavioral characteristics, whereas a prevention-focused cautious system better describes cats’ temperaments and behavioral characteristics.”

In fact, advertisers already intuited the study’s findings before it appeared. (And they exhibit a subtle anti-cat bias, which cats will remember when they take over the world.)

Cats are often used in dark and dyspeptic scenarios:

• Wells Fargo demonstrating “suspicious activity” on cards, pushing alerts
• Sainsbury’s (U.K.) Mog the Cat, disappointed by an empty dinner bowl at Christmas, warning us to shop early
• That alarming All-State ad where Mayhem cat-thropomorphizes from human to feline while his home decomposes around him

Meanwhile, of course, dogs tag along with kids in the sunshine and spread nothing but golden light and joy:

• Wells Fargo, this time with Regina King and a golden retriever promoting a cash-back rewards card
• Subaru Ascent … which featured no fewer than seven adorable goldens outside a condo sign-posted “The Barkeleys” and … I rest my case.

Cats, Fight Plaque!

The researchers got their human test subjects primed with dog (or cat) questions and images, putting them into the promotion (or prevention) mindspace. Then they asked them if they would buy toothpaste that would “freshen breath” (or “fight plaque”).

Not surprisingly, the dog-primed promotion-focused pack preferred the fresh-breath feature. The cat-primed prevention-focused pride wanted to take a swipe at that plaque.

Other scenarios found that the dog-primed pack was significantly more likely to:

• Participate in a lottery

• Buy stocks (vs funds)

• Buy vitamins that made wellness (vs prevention) claims

On the other paw, the cat-primed group was more likely to:

• Stay away from high-flying but risky stocks

• Put a higher value on preventative health services

• Spend more for products with prevention claims

The experiments controlled for factors like personal pet ownership, preferences and even mood. So again, it’s not just more cat-people-are-shy propaganda. Rather, it’s evidence that there is some stereotypical behavior in animals that triggers semi-unconscious associations in people. These associations in turn nudge consumers into a particular general mindset, which can bolster certain messages.

So now we have some guidelines for our feline- and canine-themed campaigns. That’s something to howl (or meow) about.

If you didn’t know, for the past 18 months or so I’ve been hosting a podcast with the inimitable Jill Royce on the topic of ad-tech history. It’s called #PaleoAdTech and we’ve been blessed with a roster of ad-tech titans, from the pinballing pioneers of the dot-com days — now-forgotten blazers like AllAdvantage, AdAuction and FlyCast; and well-remembered disrupters like DoubleClick and Advertising.com — to the makers of a more recent past, like AppNexus and MediaMath.

Wondering where ad servers, DSPs, DMPs, SSPs and all the other Ps came from? Join us as we regularly offer 30-minute chats with fascinating founders, co-founders and otherwise intriguing entities. Find it:

• At this dedicated website riven with illustrations, links and brain-blowing insights
• At Apple Podcasts
• At Spotify
• Via the RSS feed, if you like

Taylor Swift has a way of breaking things: records, superlatives, hearts, and even – when she committed the previously inconceivable magic of occupying all ten spots on the Billboard Top 10 with tracks from her 10th album Midnights – herself:

She also broke Ticketmaster, apparently startled by demand for the 2.5 million tickets available for her 52-city ‘The Eras’ tour, her first since 2018.

“It’s a function of Taylor Swift,” said the CEO of the largest shareholder in Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s on CNBC. “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots….” Even non-humans love Swift.

What’s her secret? After Midnight dropped at, of course, midnight on October 21st, Swift became the most-streamed artist with the most-streamed album in a day on Spotify, breaking records set by her own Red (Taylor’s Version) and 2020’s folklore.

By now, it’s clear Taylor Swift’s only rival is herself.

“Taylor Swift is nearly unimpeachable as a human, role model and brand,” Aaron Kwittken, Chief Executive of the PRophet, told The Drum recently.

As a brand – setting aside her artistry for a moment – Taylor Swift is a global phenomenon. Capital One, Target, Starbucks, Keds, CoverGirl, Diet Coke, Apple, Comcast, American Greetings – just a partial list of partners who have contributed to her estimated $400 million net worth in recent years.

Make no mistake; she’s a marketing engine. And it turns out brand Taylor Swift has a definite playbook, refined over her fifteen-year career. She still has a lot to teach marketers.

1. Be an Anti-Brand

The first single from the 13-song Midnights was called “Anti-Hero,” which Swift claims is about her “insecurities.” (Remember that number 13: it’s important.) In many ways, Taylor Swift is an Anti-Brand.

Traditional branding calls for a definite identity, promise and voice. It requires research-driven lines in the “brand space.” But Taylor Swift doesn’t have these things – she’s more of a “Blank Space” on which any of us, no matter how different, can see anything we need to see, especially ourselves.

Earlier this month, Midnights sponsor Capital One revealed two spots for the World Series called “Multiple Taylors,” featuring versions of Swift from 1989, Speak Now and others. It recalled the cryptic video for her song “Look What You Made Me Do,” from Reputation, unleashed at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, which featured fifteen versions of Swift, from the Red ringmaster to the stunned victim of Kanye’s notorious trophy-snatching.

She dared to ask us: “Who is the real Taylor Swift?” And the answer: We all are, pick the one you want.

She’s an oddly malleable brand, ideally suited to an age of creators, remixes and memes. It makes sense that there are multiple versions of two of her albums, with at least four more to come. Another celebrity, Ryan Adams, famously rerecorded her entire 1989 himself.

And then there are the lookalikes: it’s possible to become TikTok famous just for looking a little bit like Swift. And the oddly Teflonish quality: famous people who seem to want to feud with Swift somehow end up fading away (like Katy Perry) or on stage at one of her shows singing a duet (like Hayley Kiyoko), best friends forever.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim talked about totems as supernatural objects within which tribes can see themselves. Brands like Taylor Swift are totems for the age of TikTok.

2. Make Your Fans Do Work

It’s not easy being a fan of Taylor Swift; just ask us. Between buying $75 pajamas at her Official Store, waiting on virtual lines that break, and pre-ordering 13 copies of the expanded 20-song Midnights (3am Edition), there’s barely time to decipher all the clues she’s left in her TikToks, lyrics and Insta captions.

Mainstream fans might not know it, but Swift has long embedded Baroque ciphers into her marketing materials. She does this to encourage social media action, conversation, digital engagement – and of course to repay our attention.

Swift’s code-work started early. Her first album, Taylor Swift, released in 2006 when she was 16, featured liner notes with random capital letters, embedding messages like “Date Nice Boys.” She told the Washington Post: “That’s how it started, and my fans and I have since descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs.”

Examples abound – so many, in fact, that at least one commentator has ranted that “people treat Taylor Swift’s albums like they’re the damn Da Vinci code!”

Many of these Easter eggs are simply rewards for the faithful, references to outfits and props from previous albums. In the video for “Anti-Hero,” a stand-in breaks a guitar from the Speak Now tour, and a character wears a dress from Fearless. Others are aimed at completists: there are four versions of the vinyl album cover for Midnights that can be tiled to build a clock.

In her more Gothic Reputation phase, Swift packed the video for her first single with references to Mean Girls, her “Out of the Woods” video, a dollar bill she won in a notorious lawsuit, snakes and tea referring to various Kardashians, and so on.

It’s all harmless fun but can get hyperbolic in an overwired age. Swift’s fans often work harder than required, locating clues that aren’t actually there. Last September, the NFL made the mistake of issuing an announcement at midnight. Immediately, Swift’s conspiracy-minded cadre built a widely-reported rumor that Swift herself was going to be the half-time show at the Super Bowl because – well, of course – Taylor Swift owns midnight.

The announcement had nothing to do with Swift. Sometimes midnight is just midnight. (Rhianna is doing the half-time show.)

There’s a sociological theory that the successful cults are those that make their adherents work harder. Brand Taylor Swift is annealed by all the work we put into it.

3. Master the Art of Suspense

On October 7, thirteen days before Midnight‘s release, Swift started posting videos on TikTok under the title “Midnights mayhem with me.” The singer pulled titles from a bingo cage at random, announcing them and providing backstories. At the same time, Spotify co-branded billboards appeared in New York City and London with enigmatic snippets of song lyrics.

As the Drum’s Audrey Kemp wrote recently, these tactics were part of the masterful rollout of Midnights.

Swift has always made the most of withholding and releasing facts most prized by fans: release dates, album and song titles, co-stars. Last year, for Fearless (Taylor’s Version), she combined suspense with her penchant for puzzles, tweeting a video of a vault filled with scrambled letters. These were unscrambled by the intrepid to reveal the names of collaborators Phoebe Bridgers, Chris Stapleton and Ed Sheeran, and song titles such as “All Too Well.”

For 2019’s Lover, Swift provided both a Monday and a Saturday version of the mystery. She admitted the video for “ME!” contained the (unknown) title of her next album, but fans rejected “Lover” because it was too obvious, appearing in huge pink neon letters on the top of a building. The album was called Lover.

Then some sharp-eyed owners of her official calendar noticed a butterfly stamp on April 13 (there’s 13 again), and thirteen days later, Lover‘s first single debuted.

This kind of suspense makes her releases more poignant. Combined with a sense of scarcity, carefully cultivated through the ticket-buying (or not-buying) process, it puts Swiftys into a state of near-continual brandemonium around these key launch windows.

So brands, be like Taylor: malleable and flexible, demanding in a way that rewards close attention, and above all unpredictable. Taylor Swift is in show business, of course, but now so is every brand.

Note: a version of this article originally appeared in The Drum on November 23, 2022.