SXSW 2025 Promises That Fandom is the Future
Non-entertainment brands have gone mask-off in their pursuit of disciples.
I’ve talked about the corporate takeover of fandom repeatedly, but most of it has been conjecture and connecting the dots. Reading between the lines of what companies are doing to create zealots, advocates, and customer evangelists, as well as fostering intense attachments to their brands.
But it looks like the mask is fully off now. Friend of the newsletter, Holly Boson, sent me the SXSW London 2025 Changemaker Trend Report,1 which was essentially all about how to use fandom to the advantage of your brand and “turn awareness into allegiance.”
“Communities today want to co-create, not just consume, and they can spot fakeness a mile off. […] It’s no longer about speaking to the masses; it’s about showing up for the people who care and creating space for them to shape the story with you.”
In one way, it’s good to know that companies are outright saying this stuff, in another, it’s a reminder of how disconnected these companies are from what makes fandom, well, fandom.
For example, one of the claims is that “fandom is evolving into community” but fandom was always about community. The way they use the word suggests they think fandom is the term for the act of being a fan. It isn’t. This means there is a fundamental blindness about who makes up fan communities in the first place.
One of the sessions featured praise for motorsports because they’ve managed to secure younger female fans. Well, a lot of those fans have migrated from music fandom. And they bring the same neuroses, expectations and toxic behaviour with them.
As Henry Jenkins himself said in 2006,
“There's a tendency for both academics and journalists to compartmentalize fandoms rather than seeing fandom as an interconnected network. Fans move between series and as they do so, knowledge gets transmitted from one fan community to another.”
Misunderstanding the type of people who get deeply invested in fandom and the way those communities operate—because they are communities—is a fundamental problem. They think “fan community” and they picture groups of affirmational or curatorial fans who simply pat each other on the back for loving the source material well, without the group dynamics that are inherent to communities.
There are visions of “active participants” that will spend money and provide value without having any needs of their own. They are completely unprepared for the transformational and forensic fans that are usually the most engaged.
Then there’s talk about “creating pathways for your fans to become co-creators” and inviting them to “shape the narrative and contribute to the creative process, enhancing loyalty and advocacy” but do they actually know what these audiences will demand? And how they’ll react when what they expect isn’t delivered? Fandom’s heckler’s veto culture has accelerated in the past five years, something I’ve covered extensively. Are these brands prepared to deal with truck protests and inundation of fan complaints through every available channel? Are they ready for campaigns demanding the firing of specific employees or supporting products that aren’t hitting with the general public?
The repetition of fans being “co-creators” gives me a headache, because it’s disingenuous. Diageo’s Leandro Barreto said in a panel on the Future of Marketing 2030,
“The brand does belong to the people who love it, who buy it, who engage with it. Our role is much more as stewards of this brand guide, to protect, nurture, but we need to deliver the brand in the hands of the community.”
Except the brand doesn’t actually belong to those people. It’s funny that Barreto uses the term “steward” in this context, because steward ownership models do exist, and were discussed at the Austin edition of SXSW, but that’s not actually what these brands are interested in. Actual co-creation would require a degree of co-ownership with the fans; this would entail payouts and more votes to consider. That would cut into the extractive model, wherein they just get consumers to also expend energy and emotion advocating for them. They want disciples.
But when you’ve extracted devotion, emotion, dedication from people, they don’t go quietly. They turn on you. Even Jackie Huba who wrote the Customer Evangelist Manifesto warned about creating vigilantes.
In 2008, fans of the K-pop group Super Junior were upset with news that new members were rotated into the group, and they expressed their displeasure loudly,
“Since last fall to this January, the Super Junior Fan Alliance had six legal demonstrations in front of the SM Entertainment against letting the 14th member in. However, not only they did not listen to us, they did not even care what we had to day. The six demonstrations with thousands of fans attended did not affect anything. It was sad to know that all of our efforts were affectless to the greedy SM. Moreover, we felt powerless.”
I include this full quote from the SJ Fan Alliance because it shows the escalation: first, demonstrations. Then the realization that these demonstrations had no impact. As much lip service as was being paid about fans’ opinions mattering, it was all for show. Then, the disillusionment. The SJ Fan Alliance took things one step further as they, “decided to combine their monies and buy into SM stocks in order to have a legal representation as part of the company stockholders.”
If brands think they can avoid such reversals of fandom because they don’t plan on disappointing their fans, then they are beyond naive. If you want fans to have “narrative input” you have to be prepared for conflict. Have we not seen the way fans of longstanding IPs rebel when things don’t go their way? And there is no singular want that comes from a crowd because it is always shifting, and each individual has their own wants and needs. As television showrunner Jason Katims said, “If you tried to service all [the fans], it would be harder than trying to please a network.”
Something else that comes up a lot in the report is this emphasis on “shared purpose” but what purpose does a for-profit, corporate brand have aside from making bank, really? So you want company stans who want the brand to do well, to crush, to outsell. But only as long as they’re doing what they want.
They say that “purpose can turn fans into loyal advocates” but loyalty is not unconditional, and it comes at a cost. The more fans’ identity is tied into the values brands claim to represent, the more failures will be taken personally. The more effort individuals put into a brand without getting what they want in return, the more disillusioned they will become in the long term. They talk big about fakeness being easy to spot, but they have it backwards: when fans emotionally invest in a brand, they will make excuses for it. They want to believe. The fakeness accumulates over time, and grinds down on the enjoyment of the brand. The trend report claims that “brands who don’t show up for their communities will be forgotten,” which should be the least of their worries. How long can you “show up” for a fluctuating audience? Managing and catering to a community of devotees is a full-time endeavour.
The fundamental problem with this approach is that it’s looking at short term gain at the cost of long-term health. What happens when your zealous advocates are disappointed? They won’t just move to another brand. They’ll turn against yours.
Full report available here.