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Thought Leaders in association withLBB Events
Thought Leaders
From Audiences to Armies: The Age of the Fandom
08/07/2026
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08/07/2026
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Sam Gavin, PR managing partner at McCANN Birmingham, examines why demographics are becoming less relevant, and why the brands that embrace fandom are gaining a competitive edge
Fandom was a word you couldn’t escape at Cannes this year, and that made us very happy to see. Not because the idea is new to us, but because it is exactly what we’ve been talking about for the last 12 months. Marketing is shifting, steadily but decisively, from broadcast to dialogue. Shouting at people no longer cuts it. To truly engage today, you need more than an audience. You need a living community of active participants, and you need to earn a role in their lives by being of the culture, the passions and the moment.
That gap between agreeing something is true and knowing what to do about it is where the interesting work lives. Everyone can nod along to the idea that audiences want to participate rather than passively consume. Far fewer can tell you which communities genuinely shape a category, what makes those communities tick, and whether a brand has any right to show up. In the last year, we’ve realised that to do all of this, there needs to be a fundamental shift in our approach, moving beyond social listening that is designed around anchors to a new, exploratory approach that casts the net wider, ingests more data and asks different questions. This is what has allowed us to map out the passion groups driving real demand across key cultural categories.
What we kept discovering is that ‘fandom’ gets flattened into ‘demographic’ far too easily. The two are not the same and getting them confused is how brands miss the opportunity entirely. Three pieces of our recent work make the point
Start with gaming. The category has been framed for years around a single audience with a single definition of performance, all frames per second and reaction time. When we went digging, we found something hiding in plain sight that nobody was speaking to. A community of creative production power users, specifically 3D modellers working in free software like Blender, buying gaming laptops not to play anything at all but to run as serious creative workstations. Their world turns on render times, thermal stability, and enough VRAM to stop a complex scene crashing. Same hardware, an entirely different reason for owning it, and a genuinely novel use of the technology. They learn in public on ArtStation, Reddit, and YouTube, sharing works in progress to earn credibility with their peers. Address them as “gamers” and you sail straight past them.
Health and fitness taught us the same lesson in a different key. On paper it looks like one audience united by a love of moving their bodies. Look closer and it splinters into worlds that barely share a language. What we found interesting was that the most exciting opportunities in this category came from the outside in. For example, there was a lifecycle shift the category had overlooked, which we came to think of as the aging skateboarder. Post-skate professionals and creatives in their 30s and 40s, people who grew up inside a subculture and never really left it, now moving through life with different physical needs but the same identity intact. They’d reach for brands like New Balance as a grown-up uniform, choosing comfort, craft, and quiet confidence without giving up the credibility they have spent decades earning. That is a fandom living just beneath the obvious passion point, precisely the kind of territory a brand can own once it reads the codes.
Our investigation of music fandoms served as a useful reminder that visibility is not the same as relevance. Brands often gravitate toward the biggest, loudest, most visible moments, but people’s relationships with culture are rarely built only around the headline event. They are shaped by the broader experience around it: the context, the emotions, the needs, and the small moments that give it meaning. For brands, the more interesting question is not simply “where can we be seen?” but “where can we add value?” The strongest opportunities often come from understanding the role a brand can play around culture, rather than trying to place itself at the centre of it.
Three categories, one lesson. In every case the surface read was a demographic, and in every case the real prize was a community sitting one layer deeper, defined by identity, ritual, and behaviour rather than age or income. The pattern holds because fandoms are not audiences you target. They are cultures you either understand or you do not
That understanding matters commercially, not just culturally. These communities can spot a brand that has skipped its homework a mile off. They have their own status systems, their own history, their own sense of who belongs. The role a brand should play is different every time. What earns respect from a Blender modeller means nothing to a post-skate creative, and helping a small-venue crowd find their next favourite act looks nothing like either. Credibility is not bought. It is earned by knowing the culture well enough to understand what part, if any, you have been invited to play.
Which is where we think the conversation goes next. The industry understands the obvious, that fandom matters. The exciting work now is more practical: a reliable way to identify the fandoms that genuinely shape your category, a clear read on what connects them to your brand, and the honesty to define the role you have earned. That is what we have spent the last 12 months building, and we cannot wait to see where the rest of the industry takes it
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