We’re often asked if fandom is just a form of marketing. In a way, yes. At the heart of almost every fan object, these centers of emotion and love that arise from pop culture, lies a commercial product. A thing that can be exchanged for money. It might be a product, an experience, a ticket, or the advertising value of our eyeballs as we watch our favorite YouTube channel. In fact, another definition of fandom is ‘externally-generated branding’.
Month: March 2017
Inc | The Future of the Brands and Fans Digital Connection
Watching football, whether at home or in person at a game, is more fun when using the #mondaynightfootball hashtag. Dressing up as the anime character Jessie from Pokemon practically requires an audience who can say, ‘Whow, how did you get the hair to stay that way?” Very few people would show up to a Star Trek convention with no one else there.
Fandom is inherently social. But our fellow fans do more than just make things interesting. In many situation, they make things possible.
Psychology Today: Superfandom as its Contents
Each time Justin Bieber launches a new CD, his fans organize a “buyout.” They march through Kmarts and Best Buys in an attempt to propel the album to the top of the charts. Since few of the teens own CD players, the CDs are often collected and donated to charity at the end of the shopping spree.
Rituals and customs like these, Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron Glazer suggest, bind fans closer to the object of their adulation and to one another. Fueled, of course, by social media, the modern explosion of fandom can do wonders for the “brand.”
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Boing Boing | Ikea vs Superfans: how paranoid trademark lawyers make everything suck
In 2014, IKEA, the Swedish-based global furniture company, sent a cease-and-desist letter to a blogger by the name of Jules Yap. Yap ran the extremely popular website IKEAhackers.net, which helped people “hack” IKEA furniture into new, creative, and unexpected designs. The site was already almost a decade old when IKEA’s lawyers demanded that Yap hand over the URL. What follows is a case study from Superfandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are.
Inc. : How Warren Buffett Built a Massive Base of Superfans
In their book, Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are, authors and cofounders of toy company Squishable Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron Glazer dig into how some brands manage to turn ordinary consumers into diehard fans. In this edited excerpt, they discuss why Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting is know as the “Woodstock of Capitalism.”
CNBC: Obsessed: How superfans took over the world
What do people dressed up in Harry Potter costumes waiting for a book release have in common with the pilgrims to the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting?
They’re all devoted superfans, and they’re the subject of the new book “Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are.”
“Fandom is a topic that has a lot of baggage. We associate it with crying tweens at a Bieber concert, or elderly eccentrics collecting beanie babies,” says Zoe Fraade-Blanar, who wrote the book with Aaron Glazer.
Salon: Rise of the superfans: Obsession drives social change
These experts say “superfans,” like those who obsess over Harry Potter, are changing how brands approach consumers. “Fans often know the ‘fan object’ better than the owners,” said Zoe Fraad-Blanar, co-author with her business partner and husband Aaron Glazer of the new book “Superfandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are.”
NPR/WNYC: How Superfans Run The Economy
Zoe Fraade-Blanar, faculty member of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and Journalism and Chief Design Officer of the crowd sourced toy company Squishable, and Aaron M. Glazer, co-founder and CEO of Squishable, talk about their new book Superfandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). They explain how we are living in “fandom-based economy,” where devoted fans are in charge of what’s bought and sold.
New York Magazine/The Cut: Why Manic Panic Is Still Cool
Tish Bellomo looks to be in her fifties, but it’s difficult to know for sure — there are few pictures from the past forty years of her or of her sister Eileen, who goes by “Snooky,” without both of them sporting wild, fluorescent-colored hair. News clippings from the eighties hanging in their shared office show it layered, feathered, and back-combed into a fiery mane. At the moment, hers is bright pink with a green streak at the front — a nod to the hair-dye brand that made her and her sister famous four decades ago, and the company they still run today: Manic Panic. [Read more]
NBC News: How Superfans Took Over the World
What do people dressed up in Harry Potter costumes waiting for a book release have in common with the pilgrims to the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting?
They’re all devoted superfans, and they’re the subject of the new book “Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are.”
“Fandom is a topic that has a lot of baggage. We associate it with crying tweens at a Bieber concert, or elderly eccentrics collecting beanie babies,” says Zoe Fraade-Blanar, who wrote the book with Aaron Glazer.
These devoted fans — the renaissance fair attenders, Star Trek groupies and Beliebers of the world — have always intrigued and bewildered me, because I can’t relate. I don’t root for any sports team. I don’t wait for anyone’s surprise singles to drop. I like some authors and some movies and some TV shows, but the closest I’ve come to obsession is reading up on alternate “Mad Men” theories. [Read more]