The Dark Side of Brand-Fan Relationships

Global media brand Twilight and its fan-created brand extension, Fifty Shades, speak to female consumers who enter into fantastic and corporeal relationships with their market manifestations (books, films, soundtracks, merchandising, and consumption communities). Twilight's narrative encompasses the psychological power and socio-cultural allure of the ‘monstrous' vampire myth, enabling a spectrum of relational positions from devoted fans to addictive, compulsive, and transgressive behaviors. Fifty Shades as an iterative narrative embeds the plot and characters of Twilight into the ‘monstrous' context of the BDSM underworld. This chapter unpacks consumers' relational positions to Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey. The authors discuss tensions and paradoxes which underpin female consumption of these powerful brands. The chapter demonstrates disturbing dimensions of consumer-brand relationships which impact not only the imaginative lives but the physical lives of fans.

Sport Fan Consumption

Sports fans are individuals who are interested in and follow one or more sports, teams, and/or athletes. These fans reinforce their identity as a fan by engaging in supportive and repetitive consumption behaviors that relate to the sport or team they are so passionate about. This chapter will provide an overview of the history and cultural heritage of sports fandom, discuss the significance and functions of fandom, underline what motivates individuals to consume sports, examine the consequences and results of fandom, and highlight contemporary research and developmental trends. This chapter would allow for a good understanding of where research on sports fandom is headed and the important issues affecting sports fans.

We Have Faith in Apple

Research shows that some brands are like religions and have cult-like fans who perceive the brands as sacred. This chapter conceptualizes brand worship and explores its dimensions by using netnography to explore Apple's online fan communities in China from the perspective of dimensions of religiosity. The findings demonstrate that the relationship between extremely devoted fans and their faithful brand exhibits nearly the same characteristics as the relationship between a religious person and a religion. The results emerged with three dimensions of brand worship: brand faith (value identification, paranoid, and hope), brand religiosity (wonder, awe, and ecstasy) and brand devotion (gratitude and allegiance). The chapter contributes to the field of consumer-brand relationships and offers some managerial implications for building brands through a religious approach to cultivate devoted fans.

Who's Who

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.

Fan Culture in the Digital Age

This article seeks to examine the impact of the stadium and its emotional references on spectators' virtual presence and experience. Specifically, the transfer of such practices to the online fan forum Ali-Sami-Yen.net, one of the largest unofficial fan forums founded by supporters of the Turkish popular football team Galatasaray in 1999, is inspected and the significance of spatiality for the football fan cultures is scrutinized with Maffesoli's concept of the “neo-tribe” in this chapter. The notion of neo-tribe helps to discuss the role of shared ambiance and emotions for the construction of the virtual experience in a fan forum. Methodologically, content and interaction among the users on Ali-Sami-Yen.net is analyzed through the primary sources including in-depth interviews and participant observation. It is concluded that the stadium attendance with its specific terrace culture practices constitutes a distinctive source of identity among the Galatasaray fans and their online forum is the replica of this experience.

Classifying Sport Consumers

Sport fans rarely attend sporting events alone. While traditional consumer and sport fan behavior research often examines fans based on demographic characteristics, recent advances in understanding how sport fans co-create and co-consume sporting events provides substantial evidence that sports fans should be examined as tribal groups. Tribal sport fan groups can be identified based on seven dimensions, including membership; geographic sense of community; social recognition; shared rivalry; and shared knowledge of symbols, rituals and traditions, and people. In this research, these seven dimensions are used to classify sport fans (n=1505) through hierarchical and k-cluster analyses. The results of the cluster analyses using the seven dimensions suggest six unique clusters, labelled as (1) casual fans, (2) moderate remote fans, (3) moderate local fans, (4) local developing tribal fans, (5) remote tribal fans, and (6) tribal fans. A discussion of these six fan groups and the implications regarding associations with demographics and other important variables are provided.

Sci-Fi Fandoms in the Digital Age

This chapter discusses the evolution of the Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Star Trek fandoms from their beginnings to their current releases. These brief histories highlight how fans communicated with each other before social media and how those communications changed with the advent of the internet and social media. The dynamics of online groups, individual behavior in online groups, and the life cycle of a group are all discussed before moving onto trolling and the spectrum of online incivility. Overall, most of the trolling that occurs in sci-fi fandoms comes from devotion to the franchise rather than from the desire to be divisive or negative. However, some online incivility is solely guided by sexism, racism, and the desire to sow social discord. Two examples of sexist and racist fan behavior from Star Wars: The Last Jedi illustrates the different motivations of fandom trolls as well as ways to respond. Although every fandom is different, group behavior is predictable thus insights from these iconic sci-fi fandoms can be applied to many different fandoms.

Fandom as an Art Form

This chapter examines the practice of fandom as an art form in and of itself, exploring the example of fan clubs and zines by artists in the international mail art scene (known as the Eternal Network) in the 1970s. Fandom as an artistic practice differs from fan art produced in admiration of celebrities. Instead, what this chapter argues is that the artists of the Eternal Network engaged in fan activities. The first part of the chapter explores the network and compares several of their practices to fan behavior, including the desire for social connectivity, cultivation of insiders, and semiotic productivity. The second part delves into fan clubs and their publications as representational devices, and considers the role of affective behavior, including humor and the power of naming, to create group identity. The last section examines fandom as a form to critique social, political, and economic systems, analyzing a publicly circulated mock presidential campaign. The chapter concludes by suggesting that artists deploy fandom as a strategy to imagine the worlds they want to inhabit.

Return of Fandom in the Digital Age With the Rise of Social Media

In the digital age, the rise of social media has enabled the fan culture transitioning from “static” consumption to “dynamic” interaction. This is not only a result of the advancement of ICTs, but also a shift in digital communication driven by participatory culture. This chapter explores why social media in digital age have such a profound impact upon fandom. In particular, what is new with these fan communities that social media has done so much to enable. There is a blurring in the lines between fandom producers and consumers in the participatory fandom. Given the new forms of cultural production, fan culture has been enabled by social media and is more powerful than it was ever before. Finally, how the changing relationships between fans and producers have redefined the fandom economy.

Understanding Consumer Fandom

The interest in consumer fandom has been strong in the last two decades and different perspectives have been proposed to examine the issue. However, the current literature only offers limited insight into what consumer fandom means and what the main antecedents and consequences of consumer fandom are. To fill the gap, the aim of this chapter is to integrate various perspectives and theoretical bases on formulating consumer fandom and to present an integrated conceptual framework of the antecedents and consequences of consumer fandom. Grounded on social identity theory, the conceptual framework proposed in this chapter identifies two self-related antecedents: self-identify and self-discovery, and three social-related antecedents: social integration, social enhancement, and subjective norms. In addition, purchase and repurchase intention, loyalty, and word of mouth are highlighted as three consequences of consumer fandom. Level of engagement is identified as the moderator between consumer fandom and its consequences.