The Fan Economy: Building Fan Community for Products

The web has made constructing our identity through niche communities more visible, accessible, and rewarding. And whatever we hunger, we can find others like us offering the means to satiate that hunger. Today, we must commit our budgets to have the greatest measurable impact on human interaction. A dollar spent on fans is a dollar spent on retention, recruitment, RD and longevity.

2009the fan economyBud Caddell Strategist, Undercurrent

nce upon a time, the internet was supposed to be the great homogenizer.

O

With common information, in

common places, we were all

supposed to become one mass audience – ripe for the picking

This was not an original idea.

Fortunately, the world is far

The web has made

constructing our identity

through niche communities more visible, accessible,

and rewarding.

And whatever we hunger ,

we can find others like us

offering the means to

satiate that hunger.

Which means the days of the captive audience are gone.

Welcome to today.

Welcome to standing for nothing means standing alone.

Welcome to the recession.

Today, we must commit our budgets

to have the greatest measurable

impact on human interaction.

Which means we can’t waste

our diminishing ad budgets on

another awareness play.

Fans are our new economy.

A dollar spent on fans is a dollar

spent on retention, recruitment,

Fans don’t just buy our

products, they convince their friends to give us a try.

And because we all define our digital identity around our

fandom, fans are now easier

and more cost effective to find and engage online.

And engagement begins simply by listening.

Fans are practiced at voicing

their opinions Understanding

their desires and their

motivations is absolutely critical.

Make no mistake, 2009 will wipe the floor with unremarkable ideas.

Customers come and go,

but fans fight for your survival.

2008 provided some fine examples for how we can engage with fans in 2009.

Pent-up fan demand for the McFly lead to lines around buildings and

pairs going for $2,000

on eBay

Nevermind like, it was the box-set that was the fan

pay-as-you-focused product, and Radiohead sold over 100,000 at $80 each

Avril Lavigne puts as

much content as she can

on her YouTube channel And it’s estimated she

made a cool $2 million

from her fan’s views

Mountain Dew created a game to let their fans

engineer the next flavor from scratch The

candidate flavors flew off the shelves

Virgin America teamed up with HBO to offer the Entourage

experience on flights from NYC

to Las Vegas through a new

‘Entourage’ first class ticket

Joss didn’t let a little thing like a writer’s strike stop him Casual observers

watched for free, but fans pushed the show and soundtrack to #1 on iTunes

Tune-in may have been down, but the advertising drama, Mad Men, had

fans engaging fans, creating their own content and awareness for the show

A bridge in his name, a hockey

team’s mascot, humbling Kanye;

Stephen Colbert deftly engages his fan community, the Colbert Nation

H&M, Target, and others work with mega-names in fashion to make high design more accessible to hungry fan communities.

The ways to play with fans

are many, but to become a

fan focused organization you need 3 key ingredients.*

*Garnish as you please

an ideal

A Belief in Infinity

Fandom defies conventions of time, space, and material Relationships require more than a single campaign

A Belief in Infinity

Fandom defies conventions of time, space, and material

Relationships require more than a single campaign

Open Source Relationships

Fandom demands pliability,

and cultural significance requires exposing yourself

to the mechanisms of culture (e.g remixing)

In 2009, I challenge you

to become fan focused

Don’t spend a dime

outside of fan communities

Not a red cent.

About Me

My name is Bud Caddell I work as a

Strategist at the New York based digital

think-tank Undercurrent Find me across

the web at http://budcaddell.com

About This Deck

All sources, stories, and images can be found at http://bit.ly/fanfocus

The illustrations used were stolen from the amazing artist Gerd Arntz., more info at http://bit.ly/gerdarntz

I’d be honored if you stole anything from this deck.