Someone who expresses their affinity for a product by spreading positive word of mouth about it without any compensation from the producer.
Published in Chapter:
Who's Who: Setting a Standard Nomenclature Using a Fan Folksonomy
Nathalie Collins (Edith Cowan University, Australia), Jeff Volkheimer (Duke Health, USA), and Jamie Murphy (University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1048-3.ch001
Abstract
Industry and academic circles continue to attempt to label brand community behaviours, borrowing analogies from subcultures such as religion (“evangelists”), slang (“geeks, mavens, haters”), science fiction (“fanboys”), and science (“alpha”). Although sometimes used as generic terms, upon examination, these and other such labels, can define the spectrum of brand attachment in a specific way—through narrative, metaphor, and cross-cultural labelling. Such labelling is happening already. This chapter parses the current meaning of one term from another into a folksonomy, or classification system developed by those steeped in the culture. This segmentation enables further research into specific fan types, along with industry recommendations for approaching each segment based on the behavioural characteristic inherent in both the historic and common usage of the word. It also moves toward the standardisation of these terms in industry and academic circles in order to further enable a lingua franca relating to this phenomenon.