Everything comes down to a creative strategy around insights
The superpower of fandom marketing is that—similar to zero-party data—fans in spaces dedicated to their passions will tell marketers exactly what they like.
As such, fandom marketing should be rooted in consumer insights, which allow brands and platforms like Fandom to collaborate, turning behavioral signals into finely tuned strategies.
These groups might be small, but the power of highly active niche groups has been amplified in recent years through social media and chat platforms, according to Sugar. If brands can figure out how to tap into their interests, the benefits can be immense.
“Small groups of people talking—we’ve seen it launch cranberry juice, we’ve seen it move the stock market and we’ve seen it sink brands,” Sugar said.
Related video
Sharing the pen with the community
Some of the best fandom marketing strategies relinquish a bit of creative control to the fans themselves, according to Buetikofer.
The McDonald’s CMO shared a recent example from one of the company’s biggest viral successes in recent years: the Grimace shake.
After McDonald’s released the purple milkshake last year, a trend emerged in which TikTok users pretended as if drinking the shake killed them, resulting in a crime scene splattered with purple goo.
At first, the McDonald’s marketing staff were unsure of how to navigate the bizarre, macabre joke, but they let the trend flourish and it quickly became a global phenomenon. McDonald’s brought the shake to Canada last month, nearly a year after the initial hype cycle, and several franchises ran out of product within days.
