You are likely focused on the next round of innovations in the pipeline and how you will elevate and communicate the attributes and features of these new products at launch. Familiar territory for the vast majority of day-to-day marketing assignments and priorities. Yet the consumer has other priorities, driven by existential shifts and concerns that increasingly interfere with and refocus their goals and aspirations.
With rising uncertainty and isolating pressures that act as an invisible force shifting consumer behavior, brands are now facing a new challenge. One that immediately favors intentional authenticity and humanness over legacy tactics focused on controlled messages and chasing awareness as a path to consideration.
- We are now in the midst of a growing call to create long-tailed communities where, in the right curated environment, people begin seeing your brand through a new lens beyond the product line itself—and view their connection with you as a helpful architect of passions and experiences they identify with and care about.
Think about these examples of human experience:
Home chef-ing – celebrating culinary creativity and food learning
Furry family members – pursuing pet care and shared experiences
New destinations – marking travel experiences and novel exploration
Get out there – creating sports, recreation and outdoor adventures
Longevity and strength – advancing fitness and dietary lifestyle
Auditory inspiration – honoring music enjoyment and creation
Personal expression and story – hailing fashion and art
Happiness and contentment – devotion to health and wellbeing
Your castle – investing in home improvement, decoration and inspiration
18 years of heavy human lifting – dedicated to better parenting and guidance
Where does your brand reside, past the products you create, to help facilitate consumer desires and zones of deep interest? Said more simply, what world should you be building in light of these massively influential passion points?
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First, let’s explore the root cause: what’s behind this shift in fundamental marketing strategy to favor fandom?
Several forces are converging:
Social platforms have helped turn fandom into infrastructure.
Younger consumer cohorts now discover, discuss, remix, review, and organize around passions in a public setting. Deloitte reports that roughly 80% of consumers identify as fans of at least one high-involvement category.
Identity has become a purchase driver.
People increasingly use brands, creators, teams, causes, and cultural objects to express who they are. Edelman’s 2025 brand trust work says consumers now seek optimism, support, emotional connection, and personal relevance from brands – beyond functional performance.
Active participation is replacing passive attention.
The old model was awareness, then consideration, then purchase. The new model is discovery, then participation, then contribution, then advocacy. Deloitte Digital reports that 73% of fandom members say they discovered a brand they like because of their interest in a relevant deeper engagement.
Community has become a vital response to uncertainty and fragmentation.
McKinsey’s Gen Z research observed that younger consumers value curated, participatory online communities that encourage content creation because they allow people to connect and mobilize around causes and interests that provide meaning and purpose.
Up till now, the word community within a marketing context has mostly been about social media participation. This kind of ‘community’ is more centered on creating connections with like-minded people. Fandom is now emerging as an upgraded form of an oxygenated community built on contributions and a higher degree of involvement because the brand is attached to consumers’ identity.
The common ground here is gathering around shared interests rather than demographic considerations. The momentum behind this cultural development is accelerating as people look for deeper meaning and belonging – what we characterize as being part of something greater than themselves.
Think about this as an evolution of relationships in an AI- and digital-dominated world. Feeling unmoored and alone, consumers are increasingly drawn to zones of shared interest where brands can become facilitators and enablers.
The New Rules Of Brand Fandom
Rule 1: Your brand cannot be the hero; the community must be.
A fandom forms when people see themselves and their passions reflected in your brand and especially each other. Mattel’s Lisa McKnight described the highest form as fans creating identity through a brand and then propelling it forward themselves. This requires letting go of some control in the process.
Rule 2: Build rituals, not campaigns.
Fandoms require recurring behaviors in the form of drops, challenges, gatherings, insider language, badges, traditions, fan-made content, shared symbols, and moments of recognition.
Rule 3: Invite contribution, not just response.
Co-creation research shows that brand fan communities provide encouragement and opportunity for participation, making them “fertile ground” for customer and brand co-creation.
Rule 4: Cultural fluency matters more than trend-chasing.
Sprout Social’s 2025 Index found that while 93% of consumers think brands should keep up with online culture, 33% say it is embarrassing when brands jump on viral trends without a measure of unselfish authenticity around why they’re doing it.
Rule 5: Community needs a makeover as a business strategy, not a social media tactic.
Harvard Business Review’s classic brand-community work argues that community-building must be integrated across larger business behaviors and priorities, not isolated within marketing as a campaign tool.
The Bottom Line
Forever and a day it seems, brands have asked consumers to pay attention; fandom asks brands to create a place where people want to belong, contribute, and carry the story they tell forward.
What Brands Should Do To Activate Fandom
Square one is identifying the shared passion your brand can credibly serve. Then create a clear plan for participation architecture:
- Purpose: What larger, elevated idea are people joining?
- Rituals: What repeatable behaviors are in place to create belonging?
- Contribution: How can consumers shape, remix, advise, review, teach, or recruit?
- Recognition: How are advocates visibly valued?
- Access: What ‘insider’ experiences could deepen commitment?
- Stewardship: How does the brand protect the community from exploitation, toxicity, or over-commercialization?
Watch-outs
The biggest risks are inauthenticity, over-monetization, cultural appropriation, weak moderation, and mistaking high engagement for true belonging. Fans can become powerful advocates, but they also become vigilant guardians.
When brands violate the community’s values, the backlash can be faster and more emotional than ordinary customer dissatisfaction. You must follow the truth, beliefs, and behaviors that define this higher-level community.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
Rebooting Your Focus
It’s likely that for a long time you’ve viewed your customers through a lens focused on age, income, where they live, doors they shop, purchase behavior, etc. People are organizing themselves around passions, interests, and communities that are expressions of themselves and their beliefs – flags of their identity. They aren’t just an ‘audience’ to be persuaded.
Cultivating fandom presents an enormous opportunity to cross the great divide from customer-ship to advocacy and ambassadorship. You do this by creating ways to enable experiences and opportunities to express their beliefs and interests.
The world has changed drastically, and this search for deeper meaning and identity is part and parcel of the evolution. There’s a long-standing concept you may be familiar with called The Pareto Principle – that 80 percent of your sales and profits will come from 20 percent of your most devoted fans. The instrument of this fan-level relationship reaches beyond the product you sell and into the lives people are trying to create. That’s the reset.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
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