Marketing
Why fandoms are fundamental
We all know at least one Thronie, Whovian or Zephead, but it’s not just adults who become super-fans – kids can be brand devotees, too. Maurice Wheeler, CEO of
full-service international insights, creative and marketing agency We Are Family, explains why it’s vital to consider fandoms at every step of the way when building a toy brand
Just how important are fandoms to toy brands? Arguably, they’re more important to the toy industry than to a lot of other industries that have fan bases at the heart of everything they do. Understanding your fan base, and being able to nurture and grow it, is invaluable, especially in the light of the Pareto Principle that 80 per cent of a company’s revenue comes from 20 per cent of its customers. Typically, those 20 per cent are going to be your fans, and they’re super-interesting from a revenue perspective. They’re also interesting from a longevity perspective; they’re the ones
40 | ToyNews | Spring/Summer 2022
that will stick with you through thick and thin. They’re your advocates, and they’re out there referring you to their friends and influencing people in a way that you could never achieve through your own channels. They are a huge part of encouraging engagement and “talkability” around the brand and are equally as important in our work in helping our clients tap into and expand their consumer base. We utilise our global network for vital insight to help clients really understand their current fan base, visualise and quantify what that fan base could be, and define a set of strategies and tactics that can help realise that.
What factors should companies consider when it comes to building fandoms? If a brand comes to We Are Family for help building or growing a fan base, we start off with a “fandom audit”, as it were. We break things down into four quadrants. The first thing we look at is content. What’s the narrative? What are the characters? How immersive is the story? What are the emotional stimulation points that your fans are engaging with? Next, we consider engagement – how often fans are engaging with the content, the media they’re using to consume it, what they’re doing from a
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