After Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Tuesday, cheers and congratulations poured in from every corner of the Internet — including from many companies.
Brands galore wasted no time offering their well-wishes to the couple on social media, many pasting their own products or memes on top of the elaborate floral backdrop from the couple's engagement photo (which racked up over 14 million Instagram likes in its first hour alone, according to Billboard).
"Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are such a power couple that their influence touches countless brands and industries," Brianne Fleming, author of the marketing newsletter By Popular Demand, told NPR over email. "From cities she's toured to stadiums she's filled — and even food brands joking about catering the wedding — everyone is looking for a way to tie themselves in."
Companies running the gamut from the Cheesecake Factory, Whataburger and Pillsbury to Southwest Airlines, Scrub Daddy and Invisalign seized the moment with self-referential posts, photoshops and captions. Shake Shack appeared to tease the arrival of onion rings on its menu, while Hershey's Chocolate World advertised its wedding-ready bulk bags of kisses.
Some brands went a step further, celebrating everlasting love with special deals.
The prebiotic soda brand Olipop announced it will give "all our Team Tayvis fans an extra 13% off any subscription order … from now until forever," referencing Swift's favorite number. DoorDash says it is offering 13% off all orders through Thursday, "since her love finally delivered."
Zaria Parvez, head of social at DoorDash, told NPR in a statement that the company was motivated to "show up for fans in a way that actually added value and made the moment feel like theirs."
"We saw fans online saying they couldn't focus, that they had the zoomies, and we wanted to give them a way to celebrate together," Parvez added. "And honestly, when Taylor has a lyric that says 'help, I'm still at the restaurant' ... as a brand known for on-demand delivery, that connection was just too good to pass up."
Fleming says it makes sense that brands are reacting to Swift's engagement because it's an opportunity not only to promote themselves but to share in fans' excitement. That, she says, helps them connect with their followers.
"These days, to know your audience is to know pop culture," she adds. "If you want your audience to love you, you have to understand what they love — and a good majority of them probably love Taylor Swift."
Not everyone is celebrating
But the line between celebrating and capitalizing on the betrothal — or any other pop culture moment — can be tough for brands to balance.
"I wasn't surprised by the onslaught of responsiveness from brands, but a part of me just sort of sighed," says Marcus Collins, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.
Historically, Collins says, brands have benefitted from quickly reacting to what's in the zeitgeist, like Oreo's famous "you can still dunk in the dark" tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout. But he says those successes have led brands to jump headlong into cultural conversations even when they "have nothing to do with them."
"It comes to a place where it's like, OK, there's nothing sacred," he says. "It's like we're jumping on things to be opportunistic, not to contribute anything."
Things reached a tipping point, as he sees it, during the "Brat summer" of 2024, when everything from presidential candidates to backpacks to snack foods embraced the bright-green, bold-letter aesthetic popularized by Charli xcx's album.
"It's reached its peak, it's reached its zenith. And unfortunately, many brands can't see that," Collins says. "And it's because of the quick response, and the saturation thereof, that the window of possibility where you can actually contribute something interesting gets shorter and shorter and shorter."
He says these days, the pace moves so fast that it can be tiring for people to keep up. Whereas they might have rolled their eyes at something in the past, now they may just tune out.
"And that might actually be worse for brands," Collins says. "People could potentially become ambivalent, as opposed to being annoyed."
So what should brands do?
Collins says plenty of brands still manage to strike the right balance when responding to pop culture phenomena, including the engagement news this week.
He tipped his hat to Ralph Lauren, which makes the black-and-white striped dress that Swift wore in her engagement photos. The retailer knocked the price down about 20% on its website, and it sold out in under 20 minutes. That approach, Collins says, "makes commercial sense."
Collins also shouted out Starbucks, which was already flooding feeds with celebratory posts about the (ever-earlier) seasonal return of its pumpkin spice latte on Tuesday. As the engagement news landed, its social media accounts posted: "are we supposed to keep talking about PSL like nothing happened???"
"That is a contribution to the discourse," Collins says. "Yes, great, bring that in, because it helps catalyze conversations around us."
There are some concrete ways to measure those kinds of contributions.
Take Panera Bread for example. A week before Panera celebrated Swift's engagement ("she said yeast!"), it heard her discussing her sourdough obsession on a widely-watched episode of Kelce's New Heights podcast.
"We saw this incredibly authentic way to connect and our team immediately sprang into action," Panera Bread's Chief Marketing Officer Mark Shambura told NPR over email. Within 16 hours, Panera had launched special-edition merch and a Swift-inspired "loaf story" meal.
He said those efforts paid off, getting more than half a million organic views and 50,000 engagements in "just a few days."
"To truly resonate with our guests, we need to meet them in the cultural moments that matter, and few are bigger than those involving Taylor Swift," Shambura added.
Swifties have a lot to look forward to, from her October album release to, presumably, an eventual wedding. Can they expect to be inundated by brands at every step?
Fleming, of the marketing newsletter, says brands should follow their audience's lead. One way to measure that: How much audience engagement their Swift engagement posts get.
And it's not just about Swift and Kelce. Collins says there will always be public interest in spectacles. Brands will need to figure out when and how best to engage with them moving forward.
"The brands that will be successful will be the ones that can find relevance and context with regards to the happening and what the brand is, beyond what it does," he adds. "And the brands that will continue to [work against] themselves will be the ones that are, essentially, just jumping on the trends."
Copyright 2025 NPR