Most brands say they want loyal customers.
Fewer seem to ask what happens when customers become something more.
They join communities. They recommend products without being asked. They argue about releases. They collect things. They create content. They travel to experiences. They know the history. They notice when something changes.
That is fandom.
Fandom is increasingly relevant to brands because people do not build relationships with products in isolation. They build relationships with other people around shared interests.
The important distinction is that a fan is not simply a highly satisfied customer.
A satisfied customer thinks a product is good.
A fan has incorporated it into something bigger: their identity, their interests, or their sense of belonging.
That changes the commercial relationship.
Loyalty is about the brand. Fandom is about the community.
Traditional loyalty is usually described as a relationship between customer and brand.
Fandom introduces another relationship: customer to customer.
Academic research into brand communities has consistently found that community participation involves more than interaction with the company itself. People develop relationships with other members, identify with the community and participate in activities that exist beyond the basic act of purchasing.
This is an important distinction.
A loyalty programme might give someone points for buying more coffee.
A community might give that person somewhere to meet other coffee enthusiasts, discover new roasts, exchange recommendations and develop other interests.
The first incentivises a transaction.
The second creates a reason to participate.
Neither is inherently better. But they do different jobs.
This is why the word community gets used too casually in marketing. A WhatsApp group, Instagram comment section or customer database does not automatically constitute a community.
A community exists when people have a meaningful reason to relate to one another.
The brand may be the common interest. It may be the facilitator. Sometimes it is simply the thing that brought the people together in the first place.
That distinction matters because businesses often design communities around what they want customers to do rather than what customers actually want from one another.
People need a reason to belong
Research into online brand communities has identified multiple motivations for participation, rather than one universal reason people join. Studies have found that consumers participate for different experiential, social, identity and self-esteem-related benefits.
In other words, people do not join communities because a brand put the word community on a landing page.
They join because being there gives them something.
That something might be:
- A way to express identity.
- A sense of belonging.
- Entertainment.
- Access to people who share an interest.
- Knowledge they cannot easily find elsewhere.
- Recognition from other members.
- Early access to products or experiences.
- Competition and achievement.
- The opportunity to create something.
- Simply a place where their particular interest makes sense.
This opens up interesting territory for the industries where fandom can be particularly powerful.
Fashion and beauty
Fashion and beauty are rarely just about functional performance.
People use products to communicate taste, identity and belonging. They follow designers, stylists, creators and subcultures. They know collections, launches and collaborations. They trade recommendations and develop opinions about what is worth buying.
A strong fashion or beauty brand therefore has the opportunity to create more than customers. It can create a shared world around the product.
But the brand cannot be the only participant in that world.
If every interaction is ultimately a product push, the community quickly becomes another distribution channel.
Fandom requires room for people to talk to each other.
FMCG
Fandom may appear less obvious in FMCG because many products are habitual and relatively low involvement.
But the category is full of examples where ordinary products become culturally meaningful.
Food and drink are particularly fruitful because consumption is social. People have preferences, rituals, opinions and traditions around what they eat and drink. Certain products become associated with childhood, celebrations, sporting occasions, music, local identity or particular social groups.
The opportunity is not necessarily to make every FMCG product into a cult object.
It is to recognise when consumers have already created meaning around a category or brand and understand what is happening there.
Sometimes the community exists before the brand notices it.
Hospitality, tourism and restaurants
Hospitality has perhaps the most obvious relationship with community because experiences are inherently social.
People return to restaurants because they like the food, but also because they like the atmosphere, staff, rituals and people they encounter there.
Tourism can operate similarly. People become fans of destinations, festivals, hotels, restaurants, sporting events and travel experiences. They share itineraries, recommendations, photographs and stories.
The product is no longer simply a room, meal or destination.
It becomes something people participate in and talk about.
That creates a different kind of value.
The best communities do not need the brand in every conversation
This is where many businesses get fandom wrong.
They build a community and then try to control it.
Every conversation becomes branded. Every member activity becomes a campaign. Every discussion is measured through engagement metrics. Every opportunity becomes a conversion funnel.
Eventually, the community stops feeling like a community.
Research has identified precisely this tension in social media brand communities. One study of community management found that managers often prioritised platform metrics and brand-to-user interaction while struggling to create genuine interaction between users. The researchers argue that this can undermine the development of an actual communal environment.
The irony is that the more aggressively a brand tries to own the community, the less community it may create.
People do not need another brand channel.
They already have plenty.
They need somewhere worth being.
That means brands sometimes have to give up a degree of control. Let members create things. Let them disagree. Let them recommend products to each other. Let them develop rituals that the brand did not invent.
That is not a loss of control.
It is a different form of brand building.
LEGO understood this long before “community” became a marketing KPI
The LEGO Group is a useful example because its fan ecosystem extends far beyond people buying LEGO sets.
LEGO recognises Adult Fans of LEGO, or AFOLs, as communities that have existed for decades, creating regional and online communities, events, magazines and other media. Its LEGO Ambassador Network provides a formal mechanism for engaging with these communities.
More importantly, LEGO has created mechanisms through which fans can contribute to the product itself.
LEGO Ideas allows fans to submit concepts, gather votes and potentially see successful ideas become official LEGO products. Ideas that reach 10,000 votes can be considered for inclusion in the LEGO portfolio.
That is a fundamentally different relationship from simply asking customers which advertisement they prefer.
The customer becomes a participant in the development of the brand.
The community creates value for itself and, in some cases, for the company.
That is what makes fandom commercially interesting.
Fandom creates participation. Participation creates value.
The commercial case for fandom should not be reduced to “fans spend more”.
Sometimes they do.
But the more interesting value can sit elsewhere.
Fans can create content. They can recommend products and help newcomers understand them. They can generate ideas, create events and rituals, provide detailed feedback and even defend a brand when it is criticised.
Research has found links between fan engagement and digital word-of-mouth, while other research has connected community participation with brand identification, attachment and related consumer behaviours.
The important point is not that every community will produce all of these outcomes.
It is that community changes what customers are capable of contributing to the brand relationship.
A conventional customer relationship mostly flows in one direction: the business creates the product and the customer buys it.
A community can create a loop.
The business creates something people care about. People bring their own interests, knowledge and creativity to it. That creates experiences and conversations that attract more people. Those people contribute in turn.
The brand remains important.
But it is no longer doing all the work.
You cannot manufacture fandom with a campaign
This may be the most important lesson.
Fandom cannot simply be added to a brand strategy.
You cannot announce that your brand has a community. You cannot make people care deeply about a product because the social strategy says they should. You cannot buy belonging with influencer fees.
Fandom has to emerge from something people genuinely value.
Sometimes that is the product.
Sometimes it is the experience around the product.
Sometimes it is the identity associated with it.
Sometimes it is the people who have gathered around it.
The brand’s role is to understand what already exists, strengthen it where appropriate and create better conditions for participation.
That requires a different mindset from traditional audience marketing.
Instead of asking:
How do we get people to engage with the brand?
Ask:
What would make people want to engage with each other because of the brand?
That is a much harder question.
It is also a much more interesting one.
The brand is not always the centre
The future of community-led brand building is not necessarily about creating bigger audiences.
It is about creating stronger relationships between people.
For hospitality, that might mean giving regulars a reason to become part of the culture of a place.
For fashion and beauty, it might mean creating spaces where enthusiasts can discover, create and exchange ideas rather than simply shop.
For FMCG, it might mean recognising the rituals, interests and communities that have formed around a category and contributing something useful to them.
The common thread is participation.
Brands have spent years trying to capture attention.
Fandom asks a different question: what would make people care enough to participate? That is the shift worth understanding.
Because customers buy products. Fans give brands a place in their lives.
And communities can give those brands something even more valuable: a life beyond the brand itself.
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