The Fandom Phenomenon: How consumers, creators, and advertisers benefit from podcast fandom
How do you capture your audience’s attention? You can text them, email them, pay to reach them on social and search, or even fly a blimp over their house—but real influence starts with trust.
There’s no singular source of truth for potential customers, but if there were, it would sound a lot like Wondery. As Amazon’s premier podcast studio and network, Wondery is home to some of the most trusted and influential hosts in the industry, including Dax Shepard, Jason and Travis Kelce, and Keke Palmer.
Shows like Armchair Expert, New Heights, and Baby, This Is Keke Palmer consistently top charts and garner numerous awards recognition, including NAACP Image Awards, GLAAD Awards, the Variety Creative Impact in Podcasting Award, Webbys, Gracies, and The Ambies.
With listenership and advertiser interest continuing to grow across this emerging channel, one must ask: What is it about podcasts that keeps consumers coming back for more? Wondery’s latest research study, The Fandom Phenomenon, sought to uncover just that.
Marketingbrew.com / Wondery, Amazon
Loyal to the oil – how religion and striking it rich shape Canada’s hockey fandom
Déjà vu is a common occurrence in the world of sports, and the Edmonton Oilers are no strangers to repeat matchups. The Canadian team faced off against the New York Islanders in both 1983 and ’84 for hockey’s biggest prize, the Stanley Cup. In this year’s National Hockey League finals, the Oilers will try to avenge their Game 7 loss to the Florida Panthers in 2024.
Edmontonians who have been “loyal to the oil,” as fans say, have been waiting for redemption ever since. The Trump administration’s threats toward its northern neighbor has fueled a wave of nationalism, making even more fans eager for a Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup – which has not happened since 1993. With hopes pinned to Edmonton, the finals also brings renewed attention to some of Canada’s biggest exports: hockey and oil.
The Conversation / Cody Musselman, Judith Ellen Brunton
The Allure of the Tribe: Exploring the Psychology of Fandom
Fandoms – passionate communities built around shared interests have become a defining feature of pop culture. From the electric atmosphere of a football stadium to the intricate fan art dedicated to K-pop bands, the intensity of fandom devotion can be both captivating, mystifying and, at times, worrying.
Team Lewis / Samantha Aloysius
Fandom Analytics: Creating and Harnessing Consumer and Cultural Passion (Springer)
The success of modern sports, entertainment, political, and other cultural categories is driven by organizations’ ability to create and manage fandom. This book explores fandom from a marketing perspective providing a multidisciplinary framework for understanding, measuring, and growing fandom. It provides a fandom analytics framework for creating and managing fandom and identifies the macro forces (technology, demographics, etc.) that are changing fandom’s structure and societal role. The book goes beyond understanding the foundations of fandom by demonstrating how marketing tools may be employed to value and manage fandom assets. It is designed for existing and new generations of sports and entertainment professionals, as well as scholars, students, and academics interested in sports and entertainment marketing and analytics.
Springer Books / Michael Lewis
Classifying and Characterizing Fandom Activities: A Focus on Superfans’ Posting and Commenting Behaviors in a Digital Fandom Community
As digital fandom communities expand and diversify, user engagement patterns increasingly shape the social and emotional fabric of online platforms. In the era of Industry 4.0, data-driven approaches are transforming how online communities understand and optimize user engagement. In this study, we examine how different forms of activity, specifically posting and commenting, characterize fandom engagement on Weverse, a global fan community platform. By applying a clustering approach to large-scale user data, we identify distinct subsets of heavy users, separating those who focus on creating posts (post-heavy users) from those who concentrate on leaving comments (comment-heavy users). A subsequent linguistic analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool revealed that post-heavy users typically employ a structured, goal-oriented style with collective pronouns and formal tones, whereas comment-heavy users exhibit more spontaneous, emotionally rich expressions enhanced by personalized fandom-specific slang and extensive emoji use. Building on these findings, we propose design implications such as pinning community-driven content, offering contextual translations for fandom-specific slang, and introducing reaction matrices that address the unique needs of each group. Taken together, our results underscore the value of distinguishing multiple dimensions of engagement in digital fandoms, providing a foundation for more nuanced platform features that can enhance positive user experience, social cohesion, and sustained community growth.
Applied Sciences/ MDPI - Yeoreum Lee, Sangkeun Park
Gatekeeping the Gatekeepers: An Exploratory Study of Transformative Games Fandom & TikTok Algorithms
Within fandoms, gatekeeping practices such as delineating authentic from fake fans filter out certain identities. While the types of fans excluded vary by fandom, mainstream digital games culture–and the hegemonic, masculine groups within it–frequently leverage gatekeeping tactics like harassment to silence or churn others (i.e., women) from participating. While there has been considerable scholarship documenting gatekeeping in online digital games there has been less examination of this occurring within video game fandom. We conducted an exploratory study to investigate gatekeeping in response to TikTok videos about Call of Duty's masculine operator Ghost. We found more comments qualifying as celebratory fun than gatekeeping. We argue that social media spaces by virtue of their recommendation algorithms are productive sites for reimagining games counter to affirmational readings within relatively niche communities.
Sage Journals / Jessica E. Tompkins, Ashley ML Guajardo (née Brown)
From celebrity advocacy to fandom advocacy: Harness the power of participatory fandom culture
On February 4, 1962, internationally renowned actor and comedian Danny Thomas founded the nonprofit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Utilizing his celebrity status and extensive connections within the entertainment industry, Danny organized fundraising events and enlisted the support of fellow celebrities to raise public awareness and financial resources for the hospital’s mission of treating pediatric cancer and other life-threatening diseases (Stjude.org, 2023). Over time, the hospital has evolved into the world’s leading pediatric cancer research facility and currently ranks as America’s third largest healthcare charity. It has maintained continuous collaboration with more than 200 celebrity partners and supporters (Looktothestars.org, 2023). Danny Thomas’s work with St. Jude stands as one of the earliest and most well-documented instances of highly successful collaborations between a celebrity and a nonprofit in the modern era.
Science Direct / PR Relations Review - Baobao Song, Minhee Choi
How do fandom types differ? A taxonomy of K-pop fandom with network embedding
Since fandom as a distinctive customer group known for their exceptional loyalty and profitability has increasingly gained influence, fandom marketing has become crucial for the success of businesses. However, there is a lack of quantitative methods to identify and classify different types of fandoms. This study proposes a network embedding-based approach to identifying different types of fandoms. The proposed approach is applied to the K-pop industry, which has experienced remarkable growth due to its fandom. A fandom of a K-pop artist is captured as a network of Twitter users based on their mention relationships
Science Direct / Entertainment Computing
Sports fandom in the metaverse: marketing implications and research agenda
The metaverse is transforming how sports fans consume sports, express their fandom, and interact with sports brands representing professional sports leagues, teams and athletes. However, scholars and practitioners lack an understanding of how sports brands can effectively appeal to their fans using the metaverse. This conceptual study aims to address this gap by combining marketplace evidence and extant research through the lens of social identity theory. The study suggests that sports brands should engage their fans in the metaverse by offering exclusive experiences that strengthen fans’ identification as a fan, facilitating opportunities for fans to demonstrate their fandom and reinforce their association with the fan community, and fostering immersive experiences that enable fans to interact with each other and the sports brand. This study outlines several potential areas for future research based on three themes, namely experiences, personalization, and inclusivity. By addressing these areas, sports brands can better understand and optimize their engagement strategies with fans using the metaverse.
Springer Nature Link / Ellen Schmidt-Devlin & Raeesah Chohan
Cannes Lions Retrospective: 3 Reasons Why Fandom Can Be a Marketer's Superpower
CANNES, France 2024 —Brands whose marketing strategies overlook fan communities are leaving their most valuable audiences untapped, executives shared at a group chat on Monday at ADWEEK House in Cannes. Michael Sugar, CEO and founder of Sugar23, moderated the panel, which included Alyssa Buetikofer, vice president and CMO of McDonald’s Canada, and Stephanie Fried, the CMO of Fandom. The executives discussed the power of connecting with audiences in fan communities and through online forums surrounding sports, entertainment, music and gaming. All three executives are well-versed in the subject. Sugar, an Oscar-winning producer, has been recently helping brands connect with popular celebrities who inspire fandoms.
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