Why We Need to Know About Fandom
Today, it is normal to see people standing in line waiting for a new product or to meet a celebrity. Or we see groups of people dressed in ‘strange’ cosplay outfits, communicating and hanging out together. Or, on the internet, we can find many virtual communities discussing anime and using words that are not familiar to us. We can easily identify all of these people as fans of something or someone.
Fans and fandom are daily words in modern life. A fan can be described as an enthusiastic follower of something or someone, including films, books, games, celebrities, anime and manga.
Thanks to the internet, fans can now communicate with each other everywhere at any time. The frequency of interactions between fans significantly increases the number and variety of fans’ activities. Because of the internet, fans can communicate faster and with an increasing number of other fans. Before the internet, fans had limited ways to ‘meet’ each other: letters, phones and meeting in real locations. This limited the number of people that could meet, which in turn limited the speed at which fandom could spread. The internet and social media have solved these problems. Fans can now meet and talk to each other in virtual rooms, like Twitter, Facebook and blogs. They can talk to thousands of other fans at once and get feedback in a second. Also, they can attract many new fans at an unbelievable speed.
Being a fan means being a member of a fandom, or subculture. As fandoms spread increasingly faster, fans groups are becoming stronger and larger and fandom is becoming ever more powerful in our daily lives. From a business point of view, fandoms are now a qualified consumer target group and one of the most engaged subcultures in the digital and social space (Netzer, 2016). In other words, fans have become loyal consumers in many industries, such as Apple fans. Having a deep understanding of this kind of consumer target group would help companies to succeed in their markets. One of the best ways to ‘make friends’ with fandoms is to learn about them.