Rise of Fanmade Brands
When a political scientist Benedict Anderson coined the term “imagined communities,” he set out to explain the sources of modern nationalism. An imagined community is bound together by a deep horizontal comradeship between people who haven’t met and don’t know each other, but have similar affinities, beliefs, interests and attitudes.
Today, we are going through the imagined community renaissance. Modern brands stepped in as the social constructs of belonging, and as the links between culture and psychology left vacant by traditional institutions of social cohesion. Just as the newly roused national communities of the 18th and 19th centuries were ready to go to war in the name of their nation, today’s modern brand fans are quick to cancel the opponents or go to war with the brand competitors.
Fan is short for fanatic, and some of the modern fans truly are. But, as a media scholar Henry Jenkins noted in “Textual Poachers,” his ethnographic account of fandom, it is also a source of creativity and expression “for massive numbers of people who would otherwise be excluded from the commercial sector.”
If Jenkins heralded participatory culture built by fans, modern brands herald participatory economy, where under the guise of fandom, fans do the (free) work for brands — or for each other. “More and more individuals are launching their own membership communities, aiming to bring people together around a shared interest,” writes Harvard Business Review. “Build your business one person at a time. Just focus on 100 people. If they love you, they will market the product for you and tell everyone else,” said Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb. Today’s brand fans give feedback on product designs, create content, wear and advocate brand products, and are featured in advertising materials. Nowhere is the psycho-cultural-economic dynamic of brand fandom more apparent than in streetwear, which like any hobby — comic books, running or underground music — requires a true devotion. Fervor for sneakers is simultaneously a source of one’s social standing within their peer group and an investment asset (exactly how big is indicated by the size of the resale streetwear market in North America, projected to reach $6 billion by 2025).
Most successful brands today are fanmade, created by imagined communities of fans that do not necessary know each other but share tastes, aesthetics, and interests. Thanks to social media, everyone is (or can be) a tastemaker and content creator, endowed with a proverbial soapbox, as Glossier’s founder Emily Weiss put it. An indeed, as the allure of influencers fades and brands start to recognize the growing influence that comes from ordinary people, creating a community has become a go-to brand building strategy.
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