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The purpose is to argue that market-generated and brand-related phenomena such as fandoms work as a social and institutional force beyond the market and to showcase their influence on the society as a whole.

The influence of fandoms on many societal institutions is explored through the literature on fandom studies and consumer research.

The research indicates that market-generated resources and their related sociocultural dynamics play a significant role in shaping the evolution of many institutions of current societies.

The research is exclusively focused on fandoms despite the varied facets of market-related sociocultural dynamics, opportunity exists for research beyond the exploratory work done here shifting the focus from fandoms to brand systems.

Researchers, especially in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), may use the perspective shift from market to society to enlarge the scope to new fields of study, out of the market.

The research provides new lenses to understand emerging phenomena in fields such as religion and/or politics difficult to understand with traditional frameworks.

This paper provides exploratory research identifying market-related social and institutional processes and emphasizing how they influence other societal institutions, such as family, religion, corporations, professions, and politics; rather than bringing social and institutional processes into the marketplace.

Fans are proactive consumers of pop culture products, who can be seen as prosumers. Fanvideo production is one of their most widespread practices in the participatory culture scenario. Thus, the aim of the present study is to analyze how ludic prosumption is featured on plays performed in Brazilian fanvideos based on successful pop culture franchises.

Research based on the interpretive content analysis of fanvideos of plays produced by Brazilian fans based on five emblematic pop culture franchises and published on YouTube.

Results have shown six play types in the analyzed fanvideos – i.e. child's play, performing powers, cosplay, play in social rites, teaching to play and “zuêra” –, which revealed a way of having fun in different situations through different practices based on ludic consumption experiences in different spheres of social life.

CCT-based studies focused on investigating plays as ludic consumption phenomenon, as well as fan culture, remain at early research stage. Thus, the main contribution of the present study lies on associating such concepts based on the concept of prosumption.

How do you get people – particularly young people – to engage with social and political issues? Activists and academics alike have been plagued by this question for some time, and answers to it have ranged from greater organizational involvement to framing. Another possibility is meeting youth where they are at; that is, connecting youth’s existing interests in popular culture with broader social problems and issues. A group that is doing just that is the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a story-fueled nonprofit organization that turns fans into heroes. In this chapter, we trace the development of the Harry Potter fan community, the stories’ resonance with fans, and how the HPA has drawn on the community and the story for mobilization. We argue that the HPA leverages culture in two ways that are relevant for social movements and political communication scholars. The HPA is able to tap into the fan community for bloc recruitment using its ties and connections to media – in this case, the fictional story – as a point of mobilization. Additionally, the HPA is able to bloc recruit from mass society – a process they refer to as “cultural acupuncture” – by strategically connecting the story with social justice issues when cultural attention is at its peak. We conclude with a discussion of the HPA’s impact on its members and how bloc recruitment and cultural acupuncture may be relevant for other fan communities.

The purpose of this study is to investigate members’ reactions to the forced closure of a narrative video game brand community and its participatory culture.

The BioWare Social Network forums closure was announced in a thread, which attracted 8,891 posts. These were analysed using thematic analysis, facilitated by the software program Leximancer and non-participatory netnography.

The brand community and participatory culture members were predominantly distressed because they would lose their relationships with each other and access to the participatory culture’s creative output.

Previous research suggested that video game players cannot be fans and that player-generated content is exploitative. However, members, self-identified as fans, encouraged BioWare’s use of their player-created content for financial gain and articulated the community’s marketing benefits, all of which have implications for Fan and Game Studies’ researchers. Research using primary data could identify brand communities and participatory cultures’ specific benefits and their members’ attitudes about brands’ commercial use of their outputs. Further research is required to identify other products and brands not suitable for establishing brand communities on social media to determine the best ways to manage them.

Addressing narrative brand communities’ complaints quickly can prevent negative financial outcomes and using social media sites for brand communities may not be suitable structurally or because of members’ privacy concerns. Furthermore, consumers often have intense emotional bonds with narrative brands, their communities and participatory cultures, which marketers may underestimate or misunderstand.

This study of the unique phenomenon of the forced closure of a narrative brand community and its participatory culture increased understandings about them.

This chapter focuses on the importance of social media for pop culture fans. A web survey for fans of the Twilight Saga is implemented, using the concepts of cognitive, affective, and evaluative social identity and personal, product, and situational involvement. The purpose is to examine to what degree social identity and involvement can explain pop culture fans’ future intention to travel, make recommendations to others, and use social media. Findings show that pop culture fans use social media to a large extent and that these means are important for making decisions about traveling and event participation. Moreover, the chapter shows that involvement dimensions are more important than social identity dimensions to explain future intention to travel, to recommend to others, and to use social media.

In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing within a complex variety of social processes, from the circulation of global, mass media representations to inter- and intra-personal interactions. I present data collected from a study on K-pop music consumption in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia with an insatiable thirst for foreign culture. The data show how a group of Singaporean K-pop fans were regularly bombarded with largely negative messages about what it means to be K-pop music fans, and how these meanings affected their own negotiations as fans. K-pop fandom provided a sense of shared identity and status within popular youth culture, yet their experiences were often soured by negative media portrayals of deviant fans, whose behaviors risked stigmatizing the K-pop social identity. This paper thus deals with some of the problems for self that being a music fans entails.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the concept of meaning and the meaning making process in consumer behavior. While the study of the consumption focuses increasingly on how consumers create meaning in a marketing dominated world, it views this process as relatively unproblematic. This paper challenges that perspective and argues that this process is inherently ambiguous.

This paper is primarily conceptual in nature. It utilizes a post-structural perspective to theoretically examine the concept of meaning and the meaning making process. It then applies this analysis to the consumption and production of popular culture. Three exemplars from the domain of digital fandom are provided to explore the conceptual arguments in the paper.

The paper argues that if the meanings of all texts are fundamentally unstable and that meaning itself is endlessly deferred in the meaning making process, then as the consumer becomes the author of the text, the instability and ambiguity of meaning and the meaning making process transfers equally to the consumption process. Rather than view this as a negative aspect of consumer culture, this paper argues that some consumers relish this ambiguity and the freedom that it gives them to manipulate these products, their textual meanings, and the readers’ identities.

The primary limitation of this paper is that it is conceptual in nature. Future research should empirically examine different cases of meaningless consumption to provide more evidence of this interesting and potentially pervasive aspect of consumer behavior.

There is virtually no research that examines meaningless consumption. The value of the paper is that it challenges a core concept in cultural theories of consumer behavior and extends our understanding of consumption.

The character of Miss Moneypenny, whilst minor, is a staple in the cinematic universe of the James Bond film franchise, and she has been portrayed by various actresses throughout the years. Her character forms an indispensable part of the MI6 office. However, Miss Moneypenny remains sexually unattainable and the one woman that James Bond has not managed to bed: ‘The muffled eroticism of Moneypenny and Bond has survived for over [fifty] years, forming the longest unconsummated screen relationship’ (Brabazon, 1999). Fans of the James Bond film franchise, however, may feel differently about the relationship between 007 and Miss Moneypenny, hoping for a romantic conclusion to the banter and flirting that has continued throughout the film franchise. This chapter will analyse comments made on two fan-made YouTube videos that are supercuts of all the scenes between James Bond and Miss Moneypenny, in order to understand fans’ opinions of the relationship between the two characters. This chapter will make use of fan studies and participatory culture in order to understand the manner in which fans perceive the relationship between James Bond and Miss Moneypenny, and how these two characters will always be in the ‘friend-zone’.

Sports leagues, such as Major League Soccer (MLS), aim at expanding their audience at global level through alternative media other than television (TV). Brazil stands out among football media consumer audiences as one of the main markets worldwide. Brazilian MLS consumers play the role of fans to converge between TV media and digital platforms, in a phenomenon that has been called Social TV.

The aim of the current research is to investigate how Brazilian MLS fans' consumption process is established through Social TV; it was done based on netnography performed between 2018 and 2020.

Results have indicated that Social TV is a catalyst of practices associated with fan culture: cultural convergence, technologies appropriations, poaching experiences and production of a collective intelligence.

Current research reinforces how ethnography methodology has been gaining room as likely consumer market research, working as alternative method based on the prevalence of focus group and survey techniques.

Social TV phenomenon presents itself as a possibility to expand and direct marketing strategies focused on sports management, just as the media often consumed by fans.

From the results, it is possible assuming that connections between fans are punctually guided by their relationship with the cultural object consumed by them in a network relationship whose actors deindividualize sociocultural practices such as consumption. Thus, the main contribution of the study lies on identifying how fan culture can be autonomously established in the market arena in comparison to other cultures.