Fandoms have come into mainstream focus over the last few years as drivers of culture. Big brands and creative agencies have been leaning on these committed gaming, fashion, sports, or other interest-based communities to activate impactful brand-leading initiatives, or to just add some subcultural sparkle to how they show up in the world. Across categories, it seems as though the burning questions of 2024 have consistently revolved around what to tap into in culture, and what that tapping actually looks like when navigating subcultural sensitivity and complexity.

The challenge with selecting the right fandoms and subcultures to engage lies in identifying where there’s the greatest long-term impact for both brands and culture; where there’s an opportunity to build deeper partnerships without just a superficial adoption of aesthetics for a campaign. More often than not, this new trend-chasing status-quo leads brands into middling territory: hopping onto the same fandoms and mainstream representations of subcultures as their competitors, saturating the same mainstream fandoms by creating more marketing wallpaper in the same spaces. The marketing industry has responded with a constant hum of reporting out of the dizzying world of our accelerated social media trend cycle, seeking more and more niche fandoms to gatecrash. But the question consistently remains: how niche is too niche, and which niches show growth and opportunity? 

In many cases, the more niche the fandom, the more gatekept the community; a shared set of aesthetic codes, language, and most importantly, lore to contend with tends to keep brands with superficial commitments to these communities out. Communities themselves are fighting back – just think of how quickly communities soured on brands hopping onto the demure trend started by trans creator Jools LeBron earlier this year. Fandom-focused platforms like Discord have seemed like black boxes for brands, whose contributions so far haven’t taken hold in these often-anonymous servers. As responsible partners, we often need to advise that we don’t tap into any community we can’t sustain support for, or that we can’t truly meaningfully contribute to. But there’s also the risk of hopping into a proven community only for it to fizzle out, wasting brand efforts and opportunities to generate real impact and loyalty. The greatest challenge for our current over-saturated subcultural marketing boom is to generate impact in new ways, and while niches have a role to play, it’s the generic “tapping into” approach that needs rethinking. For real longevity, it’s not just “culture” we need to track, but emerging cultures that show growth and longevity for the future.

While brands often seek a readymade fandom solution, innovating how we engage with emerging culture requires a more nuanced approach to niches, and spotting an opportunity before it lands. From my years of working across strategic foresight, hopping onto trends as they crest in mainstream culture more often than not spells disaster for brands, where their window of impact is incredibly small. No brand wants to seem like the irrelevant uncle parroting a played-out joke. The opportunity widens when brands invest in tracking how fandoms intersect with one another, and where we see fandoms aligning with each other’s trends across niche subcultures. At its core, this means adopting a tried-and-tested method I’ve developed through working across categories with brands looking to make a real impact on culture. That is, tracking alignment beyond fandoms themselves through their influences in two intersecting niches: aesthetics and the taboo.

Aesthetic niches are linked across geographies and subcultures by shared aesthetic codes; think of the rise of rebelliously cute and hyperfeminine aesthetics that dominated cross-category subcultures from 2022 to 2024, and show no sign of relenting. In this case, their codes of ribbons, ironic “girlboss” jokes, and the juxtaposition of strength and softness have permeated global discourse and made their way from styling through to NPD for brands. These cross-category trends become aesthetic communities through shared language that subcultures can re-interpret, generating new fandoms or reviving old ones around cultural products that represent these new aesthetic codes and shifting cultural values. From the revival of Sonny Angel and Monchhichi franchises in Japan, to London Somerset House’s 2024 “Cute” exhibition, we see the power of cross-category aesthetic trends to truly shape global discourse and fandoms. While some of these aesthetics are caught up in the strict sorting and core-ification of digital aesthetics, they also tell us so much more about what resonates across subcultures than the subcultures themselves. If we can see an aesthetic forming across subcultures and fandoms, we’re onto a hint of emerging culture. 

The secondary and more controversial tracking comes from taboo niches. The power of taboo communities – which I define as truly subcultural and distinctly marginal interest or value-based communities representing edgy, NSFW, or content not necessarily fit for mainstream marketing – comes from their ability to interpolate trends in an entirely community-driven way, often without the interference from brands. From crass memes, to smaller taboo creators, to small taboo-lifestyle businesses, we see the aesthetics of culture being driven by their aesthetic codes and language. While taboo communities can make their way into pop culture – like the latex fetish community’s ongoing and growing integration into contemporary fashion and pop music via runways and pop stars like FKA Twigs – they exist to consistently represent values and practices that are in friction with mainstream culture. How fandoms interpret the signs and symbols of taboo niches tells us which frictions offer us the opportunity to open up discourse in emerging culture, both strategically and creatively. 

A simple triangulation of the influences across these three niche domains – fandom, aesthetics, and taboo – provides us with a more stable ground to understand how fields of influence exist across subcultures and niches we’re interested in. In isolation, niche communities don’t offer much to “tap into” for brands in any meaningful way, but together, finding the commonalities that run through all three of these niches points us toward the direction of travel for emerging cultures, offering us a much wider and stronger field to play in for long-term brand and creative success. The key for brands is to seek a better understanding of the influence generated by niches upon one another and select communities that show the greatest cross-fandom appeal. In our hyper-fragmented digital landscape, fandoms represent the most coherent articulation of contemporary subcultural behaviour, but understanding the web of cultural codes that reach through intersecting niches helps us better plan for long-term engagement, enabling brands to build stronger relationships for growth.