Will Taylor Swift Usher in a Celebrity Brand Apocalypse?
No one wants to say anything bad about Taylor Swift and get lumped in with Kanye West, so let's blame Target (TGT) for coming up with a celebrity product line that could be the beginning of the end of the mass-market retail's personality-driven brands.
Target is launching an exclusive Taylor Swift greeting card collection, which begs the question: What has Taylor Swift to do with greeting cards? Well, she has released them before and, according to American Greetings (AM), which makes the cards, they've become collectors' items.
Okay, but are Taylor Swift collectors going to storm through Target's doors in numbers sufficient numbers to justify the hard won credibility of its fashion brands?
That's where the problem lies. Touting designers and even maven types such as Martha Stewart allowed discount stores to break down their reputations for conservative, almost unchanging utilitarian apparel and home furnishings.
Taylor Swift's maybe perfectly fine and her fans my buy them. But the product line sends the wrong message. Does it make Target seem like the place to jump on the latest hot design trend or a place where you buy celebrity-themed novelty items? If it's the latter, that's exactly the kind of reputation Target and other mass-market retailers have been trying to shake for years.
Mass-market retailers such as Target have been careful to ensure that celebrity brands they bring into their stores provide the style credibility they lacked up until the time Kmart added Stewart, Kathy Ireland and Jaclyn Smith then backed them up with products that incorporated at least some degree of fashionability. While none of the three were designers per se, they had all developed identifiable styles in close association with the fashion world.
Target has been, in some ways, even more fastidious than Kmart. It has generally worked with established designers who already had won some degree of renown. Among the first, Michael Graves was a well-established designer and architect before he was tapped by Target. The marketing success that his brand generated -- Graves had few big sellers at Target -- boosted Target's design cred and paved the way for deals with fashion designers and design houses such as Zac Posen and Mossimo that solidified Target's reputation as the foremost purveyor of cheap chic.
If the Taylor Swift deals signals a willingness among mass-market retailers go down the road of celebrity for celebrity's sake, it may not be long before we see Carrot Top whoopee cushions in Target stores. It may seem a distance between one and another, but, think about it: Is Taylor Swift more qualified to endorse greeting cards than Carrot Top is to back a quality whoopee cushion? More importantly, does a celebrity brand make Target a more attractive place to purchase fashion? At one time, Target was interested in making it seem so. Now, I'm not so sure.