It’s the hottest ticket of the summer – Taylor Swift’s sixth headlining concert tour, entitled “The Eras Tour.” The 52-date, 20-U.S. city event is Swift’s second all-stadium tour and her first tour since 2018 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This tour takes on a unique approach as Swift is not only promoting her latest album, “Midnights,” but also is diving into her nearly 20-year music career, performing a 44-song set in 10 acts that align conceptually with each of her studio albums, or “eras.”
Steven Chen, marketing professor at Cal State Fullerton, has been watching this latest move by Swift unfold by looking at it through a different paradigm.
“In marketing, we can understand Taylor as a product or a brand as she would be in that ‘mature’ part of the product lifecycle, meaning she’s been around for quite some time,” Chen said.
Chen describes the product lifecycle theory as a theoretical framework used by marketing scholars to prescribe how a company can successfully manage a product or a brand over time.
“When I look at ‘The Eras Tour,’ it struck me because, to me, it’s an indicator that Taylor is, indeed, in that mature part of the product lifecycle in the sense that ‘The Eras Tour’ is a concert event that leverages her entire catalog to date,” Chen said. “And she hits on it 100%. Reading off the setlist, she’s playing the greatest hits of her career thus far. And she’s also adopting a look and an esthetic of those songs when she sings them. She’s really going through this whole progression of her life.”
Chen says that based on history, it is an unusual move for a musical artist to focus on nostalgia while at their peak, as “greatest hits” tours are generally done by artists who are at the stage of their careers where they are leaning on their past.
“She had the luxury because she started, essentially, as a child star,” Chen said. “She’s still relatively young, but she’s been in the game…
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