Are you using creators to reach fans, or to make more of them?
Are you using creators to reach fans, or to make more of them?
A four-stage model for turning creator content into fandom.
Getting someone to watch a piece of creator content is the easy part. Getting them to care is harder. Getting them to come back without being retargeted is the part most brands never crack.
Here's the problem: you can buy attention, but you can't media-buy your way into being someone's favourite community. Attention is easy to target. Belonging has to be earned.
How is fandom different from brand loyalty?
Loyalty is repeat purchase. Fandom is participation. We've spent years calling it loyalty when someone buys the same shampoo twice. That's a transaction that happened to repeat.
Fandom looks different. A fan wears the thing, talks about it, makes content about it, knows the lore and recruits their friends. They've moved from customer to participant, and that changes how they relate to the brand, the creator and the culture around both.
The data backs this up. In SuperAwesome's research with young people in the US, UK and Germany, 74% said they feel more connected to brands that share their passions. People aren't only asking brands "do you understand me?" They're asking "are you into the same things I'm into?" That kind of relevance is emotional, and it's hard to fake. You can't fake waking up before dawn to travel to something you care about. You either live it or you don't.
What is the Fandom Funnel?
The Fandom Funnel is a four-stage model for how creators turn attention into fandom: discover, immerse, commit and embed. It exists because fandom has become a growth system.
Three things are happening at once. Entertainment is fragmenting. Attention cycles are speeding up. And identity is becoming more participatory: people don't just consume culture anymore. They repost it, remix it, collect it, wear it and comment on it. The comment section is what media looks like today.
Creators connect all three. The Fandom Funnel is built on one premise: growth depends on moving people forward, not just reaching them. The creator's job changes at every stage.
- 1. Discover. Who's there: Explorers. Creator role: Translator. The job: make the world easy to enter.
- 2. Immerse. Who's there: Participants. Creator role: Host. The job: make participation worth returning to.
- 3. Commit. Who's there: Champions. Creator role: Co-author. The job: give people a stake in the story.
- 4. Embed. Who's there: Architects. Creator role: Architect. The job: build rituals people carry forward.
That's a different brief from "here's the product, here's the deadline, please post on Tuesday."
Stage 1: Discover
How do people find their way into a fandom?
People find their way in through curiosity: something gives them a reason to lean in before they're a fan. Many brands get stuck here. They explain the product clearly, but a message isn't a world.
Think about the difference between two invitations. "Here's what we can do" is an exhibition. "Come see what's happening over here" is an invitation. People respond to invitations.
This is where creators earn their place. They turn unfamiliar worlds into something people know how to enter. Their value isn't only reach. It's translation.
What gets people through the door:
- Snackable entry points. Content that's easy to start without explaining everything up front.
- Recognisable codes. Language and aesthetics that insiders clock immediately.
- Creator translation. Someone the audience trusts showing them why it matters.
- Objects built to travel. Accessories and goods that carry the world beyond the screen.
- Curiosity rewarded. People who lean in find something worth the effort.
The best entry points reduce friction without reducing intrigue. You want people thinking "I need to know more," not "cool, what's next?"
Example: the Savannah Bananas. Think of them as baseball's Harlem Globetrotters. Every game is packed with characters, rituals and spectacle that people want to film, share and riff on. Participation is the product. The team creates material for creators and fans to play with, and that's when content starts travelling on its own. The lesson for creator marketers: create distinctive material people can do something with, then give creators room to make it their own.
The question for your brand: where can people stumble into your world? Not where you're loudest. Where you're easiest to find, through culture and context rather than direct marketing pressure.
Stage 2: Immerse
How do you turn attention into repeat behaviour?
You give fans somewhere to go, not just something to watch. Once someone is curious, the job is depth. This is where fleeting attention becomes repeat behaviour and rituals start to form. It's also where brand worlds either flatten into content or become places people want to spend time in.
The internet built the interest. The next phase is building the places where that interest lives, digital and physical. Fans want their online obsessions to show up in real places: 95% of US 18- to 35-year-olds want to bring online interests into real-world gatherings, according to Eventbrite.
Creators act as hosts here. Reach brings someone in once. Hosts create the formats, access and social energy that make people return.
What drives immersion is narrative continuity, interactive environments, recurring creator formats, layered access and reasons to come back. Those touch points have to talk to each other, because immersion breaks the moment they don't. Think of it as building an operating system for participation: more things to do, fewer things to just look at. The strongest immersive brands create depth, not just volume.
Example: Maison Margiela's Bianchetto. The house is built on mystique; its founder famously avoids interviews and the camera. With its Bianchetto atelier experience in Shenzhen in April 2026, Margiela made the atelier feel inhabitable. Guests reworked their own garments in the house's signature white overpaint, guided by the atelier team, and stepped inside its codes, rituals and visual language. The mythology became something people could touch, and they left with proof they'd been inside.
Example: Palace x Nike, Manor Place. In London, the two brands built a space where you can skate, play football, see community art and use a studio. The collaboration stopped behaving like a drop and started behaving like a cultural venue, built for participation rather than impressions. The brief isn't always "make content." Sometimes it's "give people something worth making content about." A skateboarding fan can also be a football fan, and the space treats those fandoms as one cultural world rather than separate silos.
The question for your brand: where do fans go after the game, the concert or the activation ends? The brands that win will feel like places, with jokes, lore and deep-cut references people can step into and come back to.
Stage 3: Commit
How does fandom become part of someone's identity?
Fandom becomes identity when people get a stake in the story, not just access to it. At this stage, people start using the world to say something about who they are. They're not fair-weather fans anymore. When their team loses, they're yelling at the TV. When an artist cancels a show, they say so in the comments.
Fandom is becoming a language of identity. In Deloitte's 2024 research, 40% of global Gen Z said movie fandoms are important to their identity.
For brands, this is the inflection point. Affinity turns into advocacy and recurring spend.
Commitment isn't earned through the transaction. It comes from recognition, status, insider value, contribution and shared meaning: the nod you give a stranger wearing a deep-cut reference because you know exactly what they're excited about tonight. Commitment strengthens when people feel recognised inside the world, not just marketed to by it.
Fans don't just want access. They want authorship. Personalisation says "we know you." Authorship says "you can change this." Participation gets more powerful once it leaves a trace.
Fan edits and fan fiction used to live in the unofficial margins of entertainment. Now they're some of the most powerful content there is, and they keep franchises culturally alive between major releases.
Example: Disney. Disney has given selected creators licensed access to its worlds, turning fan interpretation into an official layer of franchise growth. Creators become co-authors, not media inventory.
Example: Converse Brasil. Converse doesn't borrow the community's voice; it strengthens it. By teaching skate photography and elevating youth-made work, the brand puts cultural storytelling back in community hands. It gives the community the pen. The community becomes part of the story, not the subject of one.
The question for your brand: what are you letting fans author? Fandom deepens when people see themselves in the work, not when they feel targeted by it.
Stage 4: Embed
How does a fandom keep going without the brand?
A fandom keeps going when its rituals earn a place on the calendar. Embedding starts when behaviours repeat without the brand or artist triggering them every time. Communities self-organise. Rituals recur on their own. Ownership is shared. Creators here are architects: they organise, sustain and expand the world for others, so the audience carries the culture between posts.
You know a fandom is embedded when it crosses generations, when you and your grandparents are on the same page about a song or a film. At that point it compounds, and one bad album or missed release can't undo it.
There's a sharp line between a reminder and a ritual. A reminder gives you notice. A ritual is already expected.
Example: New Balance Grey Day. New Balance turned a brand code, its signature grey, into an annual ritual. Grey Day gives creators and fans a cultural prompt they can anticipate, interpret and make their own. Like Star Wars Day on May 4 or Pi Day on March 14, it has staying power because people look forward to it every year.
Example: Service95 Book Club. Dua Lipa's Service95 Book Club brings its online reading community into recurring in-person gatherings, pairing conversation with themed food, drink and place. It turns following into ritual.
At this stage, the brand stops being the main actor. The goal isn't control. It's momentum that survives without you. Once the audience carries the world forward, the brand stops activating and starts stewarding.
That means designing for the afterglow. Most brands treat cultural moments as spikes: show up, make noise, move on. The better move is to build continuity that keeps the brand in motion long after the drop. Plan for what happens after the post: launch, then reaction, remix, participation and, eventually, ritual.
What should change in your next creator brief?
Each stage makes the next more likely. Discovery feeds immersion, immersion gives commitment meaning, and commitment makes embedding last. The advantage goes to brands that stop treating fandom as a campaign and design it as a progression.
Four things to bring to your next brief:
- Build the doorway. Use creators to translate why the world matters and make entry feel effortless.
- Create reasons to return. Build recurring formats, access and experiences that reward deeper participation.
- Give creators interpretive power. Release the reins. Let creators shape how the idea is expressed, extended and understood beyond the brief in their inbox.
- Design for the afterglow, not just launch day. Launch day is when you hand the idea over to the culture. Plan for what it does next.
Then one question to sit with: are you using creators to reach fans, or to create more of them? You can do both. Just know which one each part of your creator strategy is for.
Next time you write a brief, ask less about what creators should post and more about what people should become part of.
Key takeaways
What is the Fandom Funnel?
The Fandom Funnel is a four-stage model for turning creator-driven attention into fandom: discover, immerse, commit and embed. At each stage the creator's role changes, from translator to host to co-author to architect. Its premise is that growth depends on moving people forward, not just reaching them.
What role do creators play in building fandom?
Creators make a brand's world easy to enter, give people reasons to return and help fans shape the story. Their value isn't only reach. It's translating an unfamiliar world into something people know how to join.
How can a millennial brand use fandom to reach Gen Z?
Don't drop one fandom to chase another, because fandoms rarely belong to one generation. Change the medium, not the message: Gen Z wants more internet-native content, such as memes and infotainment. Gen Z also tends to want brands to show they're fans of the same things, rather than asking Gen Z to become fans of the brand. Treat psychographics, the shared lifestyles and interests that cross age groups, as just as important as demographics.
What should a creator brief include to build fandom?
A fandom-building brief asks what people should become part of, not just what creators should post. It should make the world easy to enter, create reasons to return, give creators room to interpret the idea and plan for what happens after launch.
What does designing for the afterglow mean?
Designing for the afterglow means planning for what happens after a launch, not just the launch itself. The sequence to plan for is launch, reaction, remix, participation and, eventually, ritual.
