『FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom』のカバーアート

FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom

FIR #528: Why Marketers Are Suddenly Obsessed with Fandom

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Fandoms are not synonymous with audiences or communities. The difference: Fans’ identities are tied up with the team, artist, product, or other object of their passion. It’s not surprising that marketers are chasing fandoms, in hopes of turning their brands into something people are genuinely excited about. But not everything is a potential flashpoint for a fan base. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore what distinguishes fans from members of other audiences or communities, how brands might leverage them, the wisdom of trying to spin up a fan base, and why fandoms might rebel against attempts to use them for marketing purposes. Links from this episode: WTF are fandoms, and why are marketers chasing them?Consumers as Brand Fans: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda Using the TCCM FrameworkSocial media and fandomHow community is redefining Media & Creative in 2025 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, September 28. We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com. Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music. You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients. Raw Transcript: Neville Hobson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is Episode 528. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. There is a new word making the rounds in marketing circles these days, and that word is “fandom.” Obviously, fandom isn’t anything new. Beatles fans constitute a fandom. Star Trek fans are a big fandom. Sports teams have had fandoms for as long as sports have been around. What’s new is the idea that fandom should be a marketing strategy. Marketers are paying attention because a fandom represents something considerably more valuable than an audience. An audience is passively watching you. That notion led Jay Rosen to write a 2006 post titled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” describing the shift away from a one-way mass-media model to a networked model in which people who once passively consumed information can now publish, respond, organize, remix, and distribute it themselves. That’s not always necessarily a good thing, but it is what it is. A community gathers around a shared interest, but a fandom goes even further. Fans incorporate that interest into their identities. They create things, develop rituals and inside jokes, recruit other people, recommend things to one another, and sometimes defend the object of their fandom with remarkable enthusiasm. One definition I particularly like comes from an article in Digiday: Fandom is where attention turns into identity. You can probably understand why marketers find that appealing. Advertising can buy attention. It’s much harder to buy identity. It’s harder to buy belonging, advocacy, or voluntary engagement. There is some evidence that fandom deserves to be treated as something distinctive. A systematic review published last year examined 38 marketing studies involving brand fans and concluded that fandom has moved from the margins of consumer culture into the mainstream. Brand fans really do behave differently from people who merely buy a product regularly. There is another reason fandom has suddenly become attractive: The media environment has fragmented spectacularly. People aren’t gathered around the same handful of television networks, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations anymore. They’re scattered among TikTok creators, YouTube channels, Reddit communities, Discord servers, gaming platforms, streaming services, group chats, podcasts, and sports communities. We could keep listing niches all day long. Instead of asking, “How do we reach women ages 25 to 44?” marketers can potentially find a group of people who are already intensely interested in something relevant to the organization. That changes the communication challenge. You don’t approach a fandom as an audience waiting to receive your message. You’re entering somebody else’s existing culture. That culture already has leaders, vocabulary, expectations, and history. It has ideas about who belongs and who doesn’t. Increasingly, creators are among the people who have earned credibility within those cultures. The strategic question isn’t, “Which influencer can deliver the biggest reach?” It becomes, “Who actually has standing with these people, and do we have a legitimate reason to be here?” That last question is one I think organizations should spend much more time considering, because fandom is in ...
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