It’s about time we properly discussed brands, fans and culture. 

Most Brands Don’t Have Fans.

The products they sell might be great, they might be beloved by many, but whether it’s soft drinks or flat pack furniture or hamburgers or web browsers, the way that these brand’s primary consumers engage with their products is fleeting and unthinking; for the most part, sales come from an audience who are utterly indifferent to their brand.    

Consider ice cream.

it’s a thing we all like, but it’s not a thing we love. It’s marketed the same way that most products are marketed; brands try to prompt the desire for a few scoops in as many people as they possibly can, as often as they possibly can. You do that in hundreds of ways, from a 30 second TV ad on a hot day or a little nudge at point of sale. 

Ice Cream brands don’t discriminate.

It doesn’t matter if you are old, young, female, male, trans, mad about ice cream or have never heard of dairy before. Everyone is a potential customer. Marketing ice cream doesn’t require some deep understanding of ice cream culture -  there aren't large volumes of people talking about it obsessively online, and even if there were those aren’t the people that are going to drive sales. Sure, a great ice cream brand might have followers on Instagram or lots of Facebook likes, but those people aren’t fans. 

Only 0.5% of people talk about brands on Facebook.  After all, that tiny minority of people who think, talk about and eat nothing except ice cream account for far fewer sales than the far larger majority who eat ice cream whenever the fancy it and don’t give it a second thought. There’s no brand loyalty and the only the tiniest bit of product preference; People who love Ben & Jerry’s would be perfectly happy with Haagen Daas, and people who prefer rocky road aren’t going to turn down cookies ‘n’ cream.  

The major challenge for most brands is overcoming indifference.

People don’t want to have a relationship with most brands. 

People don’t want to engage or participate with most brands.

Most brands don’t have an ‘audience’. 

Most brands don’t have a community. 

This is the language of consumers giving a shit. Most people don’t give a shit about most brands and most of the products and services they provide.

Are you excited about your telco? Do you regularly talk about breakfast cereal with your friends and family? Can you even remember what brand of batteries are in your TV remote?

Of course not, and that’s totally OK. This should be embraced by brands; we need batteries and cereal and the right mobile phone plans and a million other things from a million other brands that we spend money on every day. But those brands don’t give our lives meaning and they don’t make us happy.

Most agencies are built with most brands in mind.

Most brand managers know the ins-and-outs of marketing most brands, and colleagues and friends at other agencies and consultancies are experts in overcoming the pitfalls and struggles that most brands experience.  Whether it’s ‘snackable’ content, witty outdoor or famous brand ambassadors, most agencies service most brands with exactly what they need.  

The entire industry is built on the idea that breadth beats depth; get in the eyes of as many people as you possibly can.  It’s all about impact and buzz. Cool creative, catchy jingles and meerkats;  any idea that can poke through the brain fuzz when you’re in a supermarket trying to decide between two identical brands of frozen dairy product is a good idea. 

 But what about the other brands?
The brands that depend on complex communities of people who really f**king love something? 

These brands are culture brands.

noun | cul·ture | \ ˈkəl-chər  \

1. The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a particular social group, 

2. The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterises an institution or organisation. 

3. The set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic.

“A while back, When Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made…  There was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favourite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.”

— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

There’s a nugget of truth in here somewhere; ‘what matters is what you like, not what you are like’ is close but actually it’s not quite close enough. 

What if those things are one and the same?

We are what we love.

Whether it’s football or K-Drama or Grime music or cafe racer motorcycles, our identities are built on and expressed in the things that we care about. They’re the lens through which we view the world we live in and the language we use to describe it.
They’re the basis of many of our relationships; from the diehard Man U fan who could never date a City supporter to the 15 minutes around the water-cooler deconstructing last night’s TV with our colleagues.

We create fandoms when we organise ourselves into collectives around the things we love, both online and offline. Fandoms have their own unwritten rules; languages, rituals, uniforms, in-jokes.
People into punk music dress like punks; surfers have their own slang; football fans sing songs from the terraces; Star Trek fans talk to each other in Klingon. These cultural groups aren’t defined by demographic - fan cultures crosses geographical boundaries and often transcend demographics like age, race and gender.
You probably have more in common with someone on the other side of the world, someone who loves the same things that you do, than you do with your annoying next-door neighbour who plays terrible music in the middle of the night.  

A culture brand is any brand that markets to and depends on fandoms.

Culture brands are everywhere. 

They’re not just entertainment or sports brands but often come from tech, automotive, f&B, fashion and beauty too. There’s even brands like Red Bull who clearly started in FMCG and now have an indelible connection to fan culture. Not all the brands in any particular industry are culture brands; It’s much less about the product or service the brand delivers than it is their audience and their attitude.

 It’s the difference between Honda motorcycles and Harley Davidson - one manufactures a mode of transport, the other was adopted by a community as an expression of identity. 

You can’t begin to sell Harleys without a deep understanding of the very specific culture that’s built around the kind of motorcycles Harley produces; If you don’t know the cultural differences between a v-twin bobber and a custom brat then the primary audience, the one that sits at the core of Harley’s sales and creates the halo effect that drives global reach, will never take you seriously.

Importantly, motorcycles are a part of but not the whole of the culture that defines this community; knowing all there is to know about bikes only gets you part of the way. 

“But why should I care?”

Culture Brands need to play by a different set of rules. 

Trying to connect with fan communities and cultures is a daunting task; sometimes it can feel like being a tourist in a distant land.
You have to work hard to learn the language and get to know the customs, the in-jokes and the do’s and don’ts. Fitting in takes time, being taken seriously takes effort.

Get it wrong and you might lose your audience completely, but get it right and they’ll love you forever. 

The prevailing wisdom of branding and marketing doesn’t apply to culture brands

Take content.

We’re constantly told that audiences have short attention spans and will switch off if we’re not making everything as short and simple as possible. That’s definitely true if you’re marketing breakfast cereal, but if you’re selling surfboards to surf addicts or a new MMORPG to an Esports fan, you better believe that they want their content long form, detailed and compelling. Almost nothing that applies to the majority of brands makes sense for culture brands; the entire process has to be built from scratch. 

Culture brands depend on unfettered access to semi-closed communities; these communities are often the only way to grow a brand or generate revenue.

These communities have high expectations and standards; EA fumbled the launch of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 because they misunderstood what was important to their fans at a level that is deeper than good graphics and a nice story, a mistake which shaved millions off of their share price. 

You can’t sell a Star Wars game to Star Wars gaming fans without understanding, in depth and in detail, the complex cultures and fandoms that surround both Star Wars and gaming. The same is true for every culture brand, every time they market a product or try to access a new audience.