Customer experience is the single most important factor in loyalty. You can have the best rewards, the cheapest products, the most sales, the flashiest brand—but if your customer experience is poor, you’ll chase customers away, fast.
A bad experience can turn even the most loyal customers off.
Just ask Taylor Swift.
TikTok is a graveyard of broken Swifties right now—fans who once queued for hours to get “Eras Tour” tickets, bought the same album in six pastel variants, and could recite the Red vault tracks in their sleep.
Now, they’re calling Life of a Showgirl “soulless,” “insulting,” and “AI-core.” Some even claim she used ChatGPT to write it (the accusation says more than the lyrics ever could).
The common theme? Taylor stopped listening.
She used to write for her fans. For the people crying in bathroom stalls, driving through breakups, or clinging to the feeling of being 17 forever. But Life of a Showgirl feels like she’s writing at them. Detached. Patronizing. Almost as if she thinks her audience won’t notice the poetry’s gone missing.
Her lyrics—once detailed, raw, precise—have become low-hanging fruit. Where once there were Easter eggs and emotional calculus, now there’s a boardroom meeting dressed up as vulnerability for Halloween.
And her fans aren’t dumb. They know when they’re being managed.
Relatability was Taylor’s entire brand equity. She built a billion-dollar empire on the feeling of “I get you.”
But lately, the mask has slipped. A not just because she’s grown up or gotten rich. It’s how she’s managed that evolution: with a marketer’s precision and a monopolist’s appetite.
It’s one thing to be successful. It’s another to repeatedly repackage your own success and sell it back to people who already paid for it.
Fans are exhausted. In a cost-of-living crisis, watching a billionaire release the same album ten times—with one exclusive bonus track each round—feels like being milked, not celebrated. And when your “loyal customers” start feeling like they’re being scalped, the brand relationship sours into resentment.
It’s basic loyalty economics. People spend emotionally before they ever spend financially. Once they feel disrespected, they stop spending altogether.
Taylor used to be the everywoman—awkward, heartbroken, self-aware. Now she’s the detached CEO of Taylor Swift Inc., too busy counting vinyl pressings to realize her brand story has drifted from its origin myth.
In branding terms, she’s lost the value congruence—that vital overlap between what a customer believes and what a brand represents.
Then came the Charli XCX diss track. A lyrical elbow in the ribs, mocking another artist for chasing the same dream.
The irony? Taylor is the most powerful musician on earth. When you’re sitting on an empire, taking cheap shots at smaller peers doesn’t look like confidence, it reeks of insecurity.
This is where brands (and pop stars) often misstep. They mistake dominance for credibility. But credibility isn’t built through competition; it’s built through character. Just look at Pepsi and Coke. They’ve been rivals for decades, but the shade is playful, mutual, earned. It’s a sport. There’s a respect to it.
Even Charli’s own track Sympathy is a Knife is a nuanced, self-reflexive essay. She sings about envy, inadequacy, and the human messiness of living in Taylor’s shadow. But she turns that lens inward, acknowledging her insecurity and complex internal struggle. That’s brand maturity: self-awareness over self-importance.
Swift’s jab reads like a corporate brand going rogue on Twitter: reactionary, tone-deaf, and too proud to notice the optics. In juxtaposition, Lorde’s reply to Charli’s Girl, so confusing offers a counterpoint: two artists haunted by the same ghosts, meeting not as rivals but as mirrors. It’s a reminder that the battlefield was never actually real.
"People spend emotionally before they ever spend financially. Once they feel disrespected, they stop spending altogether."
When you strip back the fandom and the fame, what’s happening to Taylor Swift is a textbook case of loyalty decay.
Fans are customers. Their devotion isn’t an endless well—it’s a contract. And that contract is renewed with every album, every interaction, every moment they feel seen. But lately, Swift’s brand has stopped listening.
She’s doing what many brands do when they get too big: treating loyalty as a given. Assuming their audience will stick around no matter what. Assuming that “community” means control.
It doesn’t.
The moment your customers feel unheard, unseen, or worse—used—you’ve broken the contract. They won’t just walk away. They’ll make sure everyone else hears about it too.
Loyalty is fragile. It’s human. It’s emotional.
Taylor Swift once built an empire on emotional precision—every lyric, every hidden clue, every mirrorball moment. She made fans feel like they mattered. But somewhere between Folklore and Showgirl, she turned the mirror away.
For brands, the lesson is clear: when you stop listening, you stop leading.
Customers don’t owe you their loyalty. You have to earn it—again and again—with honesty, humility, and a little bit of heart.
Even billionaires forget that sometimes.
If you’re wondering how to keep your own loyal customers from turning into your harshest critics, it starts with how you listen.
Speak to a loyalty expert at Marsello to learn how to turn customers into lifelong advocates—and make sure your brand never has its own Life of a Showgirl moment.