ADWEEK Creativity Advantage: Building Fandoms Needs a Different Playbook

ADWEEK Advantage is part of a series where every month, our top editors interpret what happened in each vertical, and what it means for the future. On stage at ADWEEK’s Brandweek event last month, Roberto Stanichi, president, chief marketing and brand officer at Mattel, said his team views the term 'consumer' as a “dirty word.” “‘Consumer’ indicates that you have a transactional relationship with people that are buying something, versus fans who really want to join a brand, participate, co-create, and engage as ambassadors of your brand,” Stanichi said. Stanichi’s comments speak to a broader shift in how brands are built today. As marketers move from reaching shoppers to building fandoms, brands are starting to operate more like entertainment and media companies. That means moving away from interruptive advertising spots and toward work that aims to, first and foremost, engage and entertain. In turn, that’s changing the scope of what marketing has permission to do. At Mattel, that mindset shift has spawned everything from the 2023 Barbie movie to UNO Social Clubs to a multi-year global licensing partnership with BBC Studios that will bring hit children’s series Bluey to five of its biggest brands. That same thinking is taking root across categories. At McDonald’s investor day on Sept. 23, global chief marketing officer Morgan Flatley said the company was focused on “building deeper, individual relationships” by co-creating content with fans. “Fans are the foundation of our new marketing model,” she said. “When fans amplify our campaigns, it's more effective because their voices are more trusted.” At Gap, a heavy investment in a new entertainment division under chief entertainment officer Pam Kaufman aims to fuel original content that entertains fans. It recently unveiled a multi-year partnership with boy band Just Your Type (JYT) that will span a docuseries, mall tour, capsule collection, and social content. More broadly, putting fans first is leading brands to embrace immersive forms of marketing beyond traditional advertising. But fan-first marketing requires organizational and process changes in an effort to operate more like studios or media organizations that can keep up with fast-moving cultural trends. Dr. Martens chief brand officer Carla Murphy is building her team to operate like a “newsroom,” responding to trends and cultural moments in real time. In April, former Marc Jacobs chief marketing and digital officer Kristin Patrick said her employees have to be “editorial, multi-hyphenate people” who can work in a fast-paced newsroom environment and also be able to create long-form content. In the short term: More brands test the fan playbook Over the next several months, expect more brands to rework their marketing plans around driving fandom and entertainment first. Gap was just the first brand in the Gap Inc. stable to activate under its new “Fashiontainment” platform with the JYT deal. Its sister brands Banana Republic and Old Navy could follow next, forging partnerships aligned with their ethos and audiences. Crocs chief brand officer Terence Reilly said at Brandweek last month that his team is already referring to 2027, which marks its 25th anniversary, as “the Year of the Fan.” He hinted that Crocs will branch out with “new products, accessories, and lots of other things” to meet fans where they are. “Crocs must tell stories in the most wonderfully unordinary ways in unordinary places,” he said. “Now more than ever, our core consumer is digitally native… and what she expects has changed almost overnight.” In the long term: Rebuilding marketing teams Building fandoms versus advertising to consumers will require a strategic rethink of the current marketing model. Brands will have to recruit talent from outside of advertising, like journalists, producers, content creators, and screenwriters, who have the entertainment backgrounds needed to tell stories that engage fans in new ways. They will also have to rethink and reallocate their marketing budgets to make space for differently shaped projects, from original content to events like Coach and Spotify’s Tabby Tour, a global music tour spanning both live and digital experiences. Some might also rethink their agency relationships as a result, moving away from traditional shops whose bread and butter is big-budget campaigns and towards smaller studios or individual creators who know how to entertain first. Measurement frameworks must also evolve, as marketers need to find ways to quantify and defend their investment in new kinds of projects to their finance teams. Traditional metrics like reach or conversion don’t capture fandom, but other quantifiers, like community engagement or depth of engagement, do. Patience will also be key. Building loyal, engaged audiences or IP takes far longer than the traditional campaign cycle, which means marketers will have to commit to longer timeframes than quarterly cycles. Finally, brands in low-interest or heavily regulated categories, like utilities or pharmaceuticals, may face bigger barriers to operating this way, creating a divide between brands that successfully entertain people over the long term and those that struggle to cut through.

ADWEEK Advantage

ADWEEK Creativity Advantage: Building Fandoms Needs a Different Playbook

As fan-first marketing spreads, brands are rethinking the skills they need, operating more like entertainment and media companies

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Brittaney Kiefer

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