First, the elephant in the room. A lot has been written about fandoms over the last couple of years, by some very smart people, which I’m not going to attempt to rewrite here.

The problem with a lot of what’s been written is just that; it’s so smart. It’s illuminating and inspiring, but how do you actually put it into practice? On the Google Trends graph of ‘words said in client meetings over the last two years’, ‘fandom’ and ‘community’ have definitely been trending upwards. But meaningful work with fandoms coming from these clients is far harder to find.

So, in this short article, I’m going to attempt to answer these questions, simply. What are fandoms? How do we usefully define them now? And how do we need to think to make better, more impactful work? Work that gets out of the lofty strategy decks and into the wild. 

First: What is a fandom? 

If you say the word ‘fandom’, chances are you skip straight to the big hitters. Swifties. BTS fans derailing Trump rallies. Brat summer (of course). Probably the generic phrase ‘gamers’.

Fandom is a nice word; but ultimately it means being a ‘fan’ of something, to the extent where you’d see it as part of your identity.

Fandoms are made up of Stardew Valley players. Man City fans. People who have an aquarium, or like origami, or go foraging on weekends. A fandom is a group of people who like the same thing and like to talk about that thing with other people who like it too. And this simple, big explanation gives a lot of flex and, ultimately for brands, a lot of opportunity. The more we can link into big, slow areas of culture, the richer the opportunities for brands when it comes to meaningfully embracing fandoms.

You shouldn’t be working with fandoms because it’s the latest marketing ‘thing’ (I’m not sure it even is anymore). You should be doing it because the people in your target audience are part of that fandom or are influenced by what comes out of it. That means your brand can build an emotional connection with them by aligning around something they love. And importantly, they will buy into your brand more because of this activity. You might reach die-hard fans, fair weather followers, and lurkers; which is great, so long as they all become more likely to buy your product.

So, what’s the future of fandoms?

The future of fandoms is to stop thinking of them as a small, specific section of the population. Culture is not globally segmented. We’re seeing social media through the interest graph. There are, terrifyingly, no boundaries.

And whether you like it or not - you’re probably in a fandom, of some kind. You might lurk on a subreddit about gardening (guilty), have an FYP centred on BookTok, or, of course, be a die-hard Swiftie. Or, excitingly, all three at once. A person is not one thing, they’re many.

The future of fandoms is to see them as intersectional; multifaceted and rich, with different people showing up in different ways within the same fandom and individual people doing this across multiple fandom territories. And there is a huge opportunity for brands in embracing this; the chief client pushback on fandom work is the lack of scale. When you do fandom activations well, the opposite is true. 

What’s a good example of this in practice? So, in case you missed it, Guinness now sponsors the Premier League - which is an admittedly monster investment. And yes, there’s a lovely TV ad and all the sponsorship activity you’d expect. But this isn’t just a big-name sponsorship and some nice accompanying marketing activity to loosely tag Guinness and football together, born out of Diageo having a bit of cash to spend. This is the culmination of fandom activity over the last decade (at least).

Guinness has long been the beer of football fans in Africa; Guinness hosted Night Football which brought together 5-a-side teams for a pan-African tournament played under UV lights. Guinness Nigeria’s Dear Football Fans competition, in late 2022, sent a handful of winners to watch a Premier League match in person; skewing all beer social listening graphs for the period (speaking from experience). And Guinness Matchdays have been continuing to grow as on-trade watch parties that elevate the experience; solving a problem for football fans on the continent (low quality of streaming and experience).

Closer to home, Guinness Ireland has just partnered with Art of Football for some hype-friendly, limited-edition jerseys. The newly launched My Guinness platform is bringing Premier League experiences closer to fans. And the reactive social powerhouse of Guinness GB is not only folding football into its fast culture posting, and working with creators, but is also plugging it into their product occasions through Nitrosurge at home and 0.0.

All of this to say; engaging with fandoms, when done well, is not a new and shiny thing. It’s a long term, rigorous move to add value and embed your brand at the heart of the fan experience in a multitude of ways. It’s seeing fans not as a monolithic group, but as multifaceted and engaging differently depending on the time of day, the market, or the occasion. And it’s linking all this into your product and your reason for actually existing in that space. For Guinness, it’s all about communion.

And yes, not every brand can afford to sponsor the Premier League. But even without this sponsorship, Guinness has committed, gone further, and embraced football fandom wholeheartedly.

What’s the tl;dr here?

Fandoms are a real opportunity for brands. But don’t over-intellectualise it.

Centre around your brand personality, your areas of culture, and ultimately your appetite to invest long term. Don’t engage with fandoms because it’s the latest area of marketing buzz. Engage with them because you can add value. Because it’s a long-term play. And because it makes sense for your brand and business goals.

Definitely read all the very smart things written about fandoms. But take the lessons and apply them in a way that feels truly valuable, not just new and shiny.