Is the Fandom Economy Too Big for Brands to Ignore?

The fandom economy has crossed a threshold that most brand strategies have not caught up with: 75% of Americans aged 18 and over now identify as part of a fandom, according to Deloitte Digital’s 2025 Social Media and Fandom Insights study. Live Nation’s 2025 Living for Live report, drawing on 40,000 respondents across 15 markets, found that fans globally have ranked live concerts above sports, film, and every other form of entertainment — a majority consumer behavior that has fundamentally changed how people find brands and decide where their money goes.

Few brands and organizations have built a strategy around it. Some haven’t even registered it as a priority.

The consumer journey has already changed

The commercial logic that defined brand strategy for decades — awareness, consideration, purchase — still functions, but for a shrinking share of the market. A significant portion of consumers, particularly across retail, fashion, beauty, and entertainment, now operates differently. Discovery happens more and more inside fan communities long before advertising enters the picture, and people increasingly buy from brands they have already encountered through such a community rather than through a campaign.

73% of fandom members say they discovered a brand they like through their fandom, per Deloitte Digital. Human8’s 2026 consumer trends research found that 52% of people now describe shopping as less about owning products and more about a sense of belonging. That shift has structural consequences for how brands reach people. Most of them, however, were not built to respond to it.

What does the fandom economy data show?

Fans, as Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey defines people who identify strongly with music, sports, gaming, television, or film, spend $71 per month on streaming services alone, against $56 for non-fans, a 27% premium sustained over time. They also spend 51 additional minutes per day on entertainment activities, while 55% of them engage across multiple platforms — streaming, merchandise, live events, social media — driven by a single fandom. The depth of that engagement, and the spending that follows it, is categorically different from what a passive consumer audience generates. Vevo’s 2025 Fandom = Cultural Currency report, drawing on 6,000 fans across the US, UK, and Australia, found that nine in ten music fans say their fandom is central to their identity, and that fans buy to express that identity, not out of habit or convenience. Sports fandom tells the same story at a different scale: World Cup-related merchandise sales for the 2026 tournament cycle were projected to reach $5 billion globally, according to licensing industry analysts — a figure that would make it the largest merchandise cycle in the competition’s history.

The data shows that brands are registering the shift, even if many haven’t yet acted on it. Sixty-five percent of brands active on social media already cite activating and monetizing their fan base as a high or very high priority, according to Deloitte Digital, and 42% plan to increase their fandom-related budgets by 10% or more. We Are Social’s Think Forward 2026 report puts it plainly: 73% of marketers now consider fandoms essential to their strategies. Commercial recognition is there. Organizational readiness, for most, is not.

Which brands understood the assignment

Three early movers illustrate how different the entry points can be, and how little any of them resemble traditional sponsorship.

In late 2025, Coach partnered with Sunnie Reads, the Gen Z book club from Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, and created The Book Nook, an immersive experience built around book swaps, reading spaces, and custom leather bookmarks. A follow-up charm collection with Penguin Random House generated organic content from attendees and creators that amplified the campaign well beyond anything paid reach alone could have delivered. The result: a luxury brand in a cultural conversation it didn’t have to manufacture.

American Express found its entry point in the fandom economy through a different mechanism altogether. The brand stopped promoting interest rates and started promoting access, turning its card into a presale key for major concert tours and repositioning a financial product as infrastructure for the experiences fans really want.

McDonald’s and Netflix handled it completely differently. When Netflix’s K-pop film Demon Hunters generated intense fan communities after its June 2025 premiere, a collaboration followed: two competing meal combos mapped to the film’s central groups. Netflix CMO Marian Lee said on record at Cannes Lions that the team looked directly to fan requests to determine what the campaign would contain. In practice, the fans wrote the brief.

What it costs not to engage

Most brands have seen the data. Where they consistently go wrong is in how they read it. Fan communities are deep and specific by nature: organized around particular aesthetics, particular cultural moments, particular IP. Brands read that specificity as smallness. A deeply invested community of half a million people, however, consistently outspends a passive mainstream audience ten times its size.

Fashion and beauty brands have largely excluded BookTok creators — TikTok’s book recommendation community, and now one of the most commercially influential reading cultures globally — from their influencer programs, despite millions of organic views of character makeup tutorials, book cover-inspired aesthetics, and dark academia styling. Content fan communities created without brand budgets and without being asked. Circana estimated that BookTok-related book sales jumped 20% in 2024 to around 60 million units in the US alone. So when the sponsored version of that cultural energy does materialize, it will be built by whoever shows up first with a genuine understanding of the culture.

The stakes extend beyond a missed campaign. According to Snack Drawer’s Fandomination! report, based on a nationally representative survey of 2,000 Australians, 66% of consumers believe brands should participate in fan communities, but only when they add real value. Twenty percent have actively stopped supporting a brand they felt was exploiting their community for reach. These are discerning audiences with long institutional memories and real spending power, and they distinguish very quickly between a brand that understands their culture and one that is simply mining it for commercial gain.

The fandom economy does not slow down

Fan communities do not wait. They form, consolidate, and move — on TikTok, Discord, Reddit, and Twitch — well before the conversation surfaces in mainstream media or reaches a strategy meeting. The window to enter credibly exists before the peak. By the time a fandom becomes obvious enough to justify internal budget discussions, it has already formed opinions about the brands that weren’t present.

The adjustment required goes deeper than a revised fandom marketing brief. The brands with real commercial traction in this space have stopped treating fandoms as a media placement and started using them as a source of intelligence: where trends surface earliest and where trust accrues long before a commercial relationship is even formalized.

Fan communities will keep growing, keep spending, and keep building culture with or without brand involvement. The only question is whether brands will choose to be part of that culture.