Fan Communities
More than ever today and increasingly so in the future, businesses and organisations expect marketing professionals to leverage fan communities to promote the brand and generate both word of mouth (WOM) and sales. The advent of the internet, and social media, has created a public marketplace of discourse about virtually every product and brand. The expectations on marketers to be able to craft messages for these groups, control as well as direct their behaviour, and use them to generate more sales assumes that somehow fans are in service to brands. Yet fans, like any groups of people, are a disparate group of individuals with their own motivations and reasons for everything they do.
In short, marketers are expected to be experts in the consumer communities, and of the fans who spread word of mouth about their product. Moreover, the marketers are expected to exert control and mobilise these fans and communities.
Yet in the same way that the Vatican cannot control the lives of everyone who identifies as Catholic, many fans do not follow a product’s doctrine. At least three decades of academic and industry research confirms this argument across fan communities, also known as brand communities (Casalo, Flavian, & Guinaliu, 2007; Cova, Pace, & Park, 2007; Schau, Muniz, & Arnould, 2009; Zhou, Zhang, Su, & Zhou, 2012)Sánchez-Casado, Confente, I., Tomaseti-Solano, & Brunetti, 2018), brand cults (Nathalie Collins, Gläbe, Mizerski, & Murphy; Schlanger & Bhasin, 2013) and subcultures of consumption (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Chalmers & Arthur, 2008; Lewin, 2013; Schouten & McAlexander, 1995; Ulusoy, 2016).
Businesses and researchers have more data than ever regarding who purchases a product, their product use, who is spreading WOM, and where. This surge in information, down to specific user behavior, is the basis for the belief that when one knows things about people, one can influence or control those same people. How can marketers, who work in such product and brand-specific contexts, better understand and therefore leverage their fan bases? Just as importantly, how can marketers communicate to their own organisations what a reasonable investment in fan communities constitutes, as well as a reasonable return on that investment? How can marketers manage their organisations’, and their own, expectations on what successful fan management looks like? Finally, is fan management even possible?