Super fans are where every conversation about belonging eventually lands, and where marketers most reliably fool themselves. This episode weighs what that small, loud fraction of a customer base is really worth: the co-creation and feedback loops that make them genuinely valuable, the word-of-mouth reach they're assumed to have, and the point where fandom hardens into gatekeeping and starts working against growth. It runs through Lego's adult fans, Vaseline's catalogue of unofficial uses, an Xbox community programme from 2005, and the awkward case for the ivory tower — brands that built devotion by refusing to engage at all. Part two of two, following last week's episode on belonging.

Belonging is one of the oldest drivers there is: the tribal brain sorts us from them in under a tenth of a second, and will do it on the strength of a coin toss. Brands keep asking how to build some. This episode works through what that means in practice — why belonging sits between people rather than between a person and a logo, what it takes to show up credibly inside a tribe you didn't create, and how much easier the question gets once you accept that everyone belongs to several tribes at once. Bases, spaces and faces, why CRM might need renaming, and what all of it should really change about a marketer's objectives. Part one of two, as the argument will move next week to the worth of superfans.

Vikki Ross spent most of last year believing the headlines that said AI was coming for copywriters, pondering whether what she loved doing most could be automated. She started a podcast specifically to ask industry leaders how they were replacing creatives with AI, and got the same answer from every one of them: they weren't. She joins Shann and Lynette to work out what AI still can't do with words, what's stopping it from reaching that stage. Along the way: why Virgin Voyages' AI-written copy could have belonged to any brand, what has gone wrong with car advertising, and why "anything that feels really easy to read was probably really hard to write."