When fans revolt, it’s not pretty. Feelings of fandom are deeply tied into a fan’s personal identity, and it’s easy for the brand owner to accidentally ignore, trivialize, or modify something that sits at the heart of fan feelings. It is a rare fan object indeed that doesn’t make the occasional misstep and suffer the inevitable wrath of its previously adoring audience. Sometimes such uprisings can be avoided or defused. Sometimes it’s more important not to avoid or defuse them at all.
Fan revolts often emerge out of seemingly small actions taken by the fan-object owner. Frequently, the corporate management team doesn’t realize what it’s done, nor does it understand where the subsequent backlash comes from. But every change within a fandom requires the fans to reevaluate if the new values of their fan object still match their own. When the pope issues a new decree about church policy, it changes what it means to be a Catholic for people around the world. When a political party decides to update its stance on an important issue in order to court a new demographic, it changes what it means to be a member of that party for its existing constituents. If people don’t like it, they must decide if they wish to go along with the change, advocate for its reversal, or abandon the fandom altogether.
Fans are not always right. Brand owners frequently have business imperatives that conflict with the change-averse nature of their fandom, and unpopular decisions sometimes address legitimate business concerns. Without such decisions, the fan object might cease to exist. Legal departments need to protect an organization’s intellectual property, research and development departments need to expand into new fields and products, and marketing departments need to attract new customers if a business is to grow. Some of the best brand decisions have reduced an existing fan base but in time created a much wider new one.
Having fans feels good. Having fans is fun, and it’s validating and empowering. But ultimately, there is a dark side of fan management, a side that’s about recognizing what could cause a fan revolt, preparing for the backlash, deciding if it’s worth it, and responding as authentically as possible.
“I Died a Little Inside Today”
Bill Samuels Jr. and his son Rob had a problem. Their family business was seeing skyrocketing sales, and they couldn’t begin to keep up with demand. For most other products this issue would lead to temporary shortages while production ramped up, but in the liquor business it’s more complicated. It takes roughly six years to age a barrel of Maker’s Mark bourbon, the Samuels family’s famous whiskey (or whisky, as they prefer to spell it). That means when Maker’s Mark misestimates demand, it takes six years to readjust their supply.
On March 15, 2012, a heavily debated US–Korea Free Trade Agreement had gone into effect, ending tariffs on most goods flowing between the two countries. Opponents on both sides decried the deal—US producers complained that it didn’t do enough for US exports of beef and steel, and Koreans worried that it would hurt domestic agriculture. Massive anti-FTA rallies rocked South Korea, with at least one protester setting himself on fire. Nevertheless, the US accepted it in October 2011, and Korea followed suit a month later.
Suddenly, untariffed American booze flooded into South Korea. Vodka, rum, and gin all saw upticks in consumption, but the arguable winner was bourbon-style whiskey.
Bourbon is the American liquor. Ninety-five percent of the entire global bourbon supply comes from Kentucky. The United States Senate has declared it “America’s Native Spirit.” Western-style liquors like bourbon have become increasingly popular in Korea as a booming economy gives consumers a taste for affordable luxury. It’s expensive enough to be a status symbol, but not expensive enough to exclude the middle class. The Distilled Spirits Council, a trade group representing US-based liquors, had spent years and millions of dollars lobbying for the trade agreement, and they had prevailed. Bourbon leaving the US bound for Korea had once carried a 20 percent tax. Soon it would effectively carry none.
The FTA came in the middle of a rapid rise in the fortunes of American whiskey makers. In Japan, an appetite for highballs had boosted whiskey imports. In Hong Kong, magazines ran suggestions about which bars to find exotic whiskeys in and which mixologists made the best Old Fashioned and Manhattan. “In the liquor industry, one of the only things hotter than Kentucky bourbon is super-expensive Kentucky bourbon,” quipped Bloomberg Business.
In theory, as one of Kentucky’s most established bourbons, Maker’s Mark’s brown square bottle with the hand-dipped red wax seal was perfectly positioned to benefit from the new Asian markets, especially in Korea, where whiskey was already the hard liquor of choice.
Brand lore has it that the current version of Maker’s Mark was invented in the 1950s, when Bill Samuels Sr. baked whiskey ingredients into loaves of bread to find the perfect grain combination. The winning loaf, an unusual mix of red winter wheat, corn, and malted barley, went on to become the beverage as it is today: a bourbon with a good balance and a medium body, with a taste of spice, caramel, vanilla, cherries, citrus, and nuttiness. To bring out those flavors, each barrel is aged for five and a half to seven years, to taste. A tasting panel, including the master distiller, has to decide that the bourbon is ready for the world before it can be sold.
Therein lay the problem. Given the average maturation time for a barrel, the distiller must guess what demand will be like more than half a decade in the future. A wrong guess now means there will be too much or too little supply when the batch is ready later. Usually, they’re spot on. Occasionally they miss, like when the Wall Street Journal ran a surprise front-page article about Maker’s Mark back in 1980, unexpectedly boosting sales well beyond their supply. But the new surge in overseas interest was unlike anything they had seen before. Had Maker’s Mark been able to predict the explosion of demand in Asia, perhaps it could have increased its stocks in time. As it was, if it failed to make a splash in Asian markets during the window of opportunity, other brands would beat the company to it.
Facing the specter of the kind of shortages that can cause irreparable damage to a brand, Maker’s Mark had two options. The first was to raise prices, something they were loath to do because it might place its product out of reach of the very audience it was courting. The second solution was to stretch its existing supply. Or, in layman’s terms, to water it down.
All bourbon has water added to it at various times in its life cycle. Maker’s Mark proposed to add a little more. Formerly, Maker’s Mark bourbon was 90 proof, or 45 percent alcohol. The new recipe would add enough water to reduce the alcohol content by 6.7 percent, down to 84 proof. The additional volume would allow the existing supply to stretch for an extra four years, enough time to begin ramping up production to meet the new demand. At the very least, it would give the distiller a chance to retain its competitive edge against bourbons whose shorter maturation process left them better equipped to enter the new markets.
Maker’s Mark calls its biggest fans “Ambassadors,” and offers them a loyalty program with special merchandise and advance announcements about new products. They can get their name on a barrel of bourbon. It’s these fans that Maker’s Mark first decided to inform about the recipe update. After all, if transparency increases trust, being as honest as possible with fans was surely the best policy.
The email went out on a Saturday. In it, Rob Samuels, the CEO, and Bill Samuels Jr., son of the man who had created the 1950s baked-bread recipe, explained the situation: the demand for Maker’s Mark bourbon had exploded beyond their expectations, and they were in danger of running out. They promised that, except for the updated alcohol content, the rest of the process would remain unchanged, and the taste would be identical. “In other words, we’ve made sure we didn’t screw up your whisky,” they wrote.
The news site Quartz ran a short piece on the new recipe on its website. A few tweets were posted on Twitter. The world held its breath. And then, shortly after seven thirty p.m., like an angry, drunken wave, the Internet rose up and broke upon Maker’s Mark with outrage. In their own words:
“SHAME on you Maker’s Mark for doing this.”
“Some bonehead Accountant must have come up with this greedy scheme at the expense of quality!!!!”
“Only a Commie Liberal would think that watering down a product so that more customers gets [sic] less is the right path.”
“Shame on you Maker’s! Who cares of [sic] some Frenchmen or other terrorist can’t enjoy our sweet American nectar!?”
“I knew this stuff was going to start happening once the younger generation took the helm.”
“Criminally stupid idea.”
“Hearing this has cut me to the heart.”
“This is an absolute travesty.”
“I hereby resign as a Maker’s Ambassador. I have bought my last bottle.”
“I died a little inside today.”
“Don’t worry Marker’s Mark—there will be less demand now!”
“Idiots.”
Before long the feedback had turned into a kind of gleeful indignation, as though the audience enjoyed having something to get good and angry about. And these were Maker’s Mark’s superfans! The fans who had invested money in Maker’s Mark collections. The fans who wore Maker’s Mark logos, and attended Maker’s Mark tastings, and extolled the virtues of Maker’s Mark to nonbelievers. The fans who could normally be expected to defend Maker’s Mark, or at least give it the benefit of the doubt.
Fandom thrives on the fun and excitement of feeling like we are part of an entity that’s bigger than ourselves, but that entity doesn’t have to be something nice. Angry mobs are also a lot of fun, at least for those on the inside. As one commentator joked, “Our fans have made us one of the best-selling bourbons of all time. To say ‘thank you,’ we’re gonna . . . water it down! No no, really, you don’t have to thank us . . . Um, where did you get all those torches and pitchforks from?”
By the next day, the new brew had been dubbed “Maker’s Watermark,” and what was supposed to be a minor recipe tweak had catalyzed a rebellion. Maker’s Mark’s Facebook page spiraled into gleeful carnage. Hundreds of blogs voiced their vitriol. The twitterverse was in revolt. Mainstream media took full advantage of the easy website traffic, with headlines like “Less Potent Maker’s Mark Not Going Down Smoothly In Kentucky.” Forum after forum filled with advice about which new bourbon brands to try now that Maker’s Mark was disgraced. Fans derailed the conversation at a Maker’s Mark corporate event being held at a steakhouse in Indiana. “Let’s just say they didn’t hold back,” remembered Rob Samuels later.
Anger turned into hostility, which in turn shaded into ugliness as only the Internet can. Both of the letter signers’ email addresses were publicly posted to encourage harassment. The Maker’s Mark offices were deluged with emails and phone calls. “Enjoy your bankruptcy proceedings, Maker’s Mark. The Age of the Customer has begun, and we’re tired of being crapped on by corporate thugs,” snarled one so-called fan on Facebook.
Bewildered by the unexpected pushback, Rob and Bill Samuels tried to explain themselves in an interview with Quartz, the news outlet that had broken the news. We honestly have no choice, they explained. You won’t be able to tell the difference. Really. The explanation only seemed to stoke the flames (“Now you’re saying we don’t have any taste?”). The new blend had become such a nexus of emotion that appeals to logic were almost beside the point.
The following Sunday, Maker’s Mark, dazed from a week of abuse and hostility, wrote to say they were capitulating to fan demands. Even though they thought reducing the alcohol content of Maker’s Mark was the right thing to do, they wrote, “this is your brand—and you told us in large numbers to change our decision. You spoke. We listened. And we’re sincerely sorry we let you down.”
Customers Are Always Right. Fans Aren’t.
It is terrifying to be on the receiving end of fan anger. It’s all the more so because fandom uses the language of extremes. This band is THE BEST BAND THAT EVER EXISTED EVER. That other rival band is PURE EVIL AND TOTAL CRAP. Nothing compares to the outrage of a fan group that has decided to get good and mad for a while.
It’s fun to get angry. It’s fun to, for example, compare a slight alteration in the recipe of a beloved beverage with Nazism. In fact, equating something to Nazism on the Internet is so common it has been given its own adage: Godwin’s Law. The hyperbole of it adds to the silliness, and the more seriously we claim to take it, the more fun it is. But few fans truly believed a minor decrease in the alcohol content of a mid-tier bourbon was the moral equivalent of the violent deaths of 60 million people.
All of fandom is, on some level, about pretending. It’s about making a choice to buy into the immaterial, ephemeral context surrounding a fan object. Sensationalism is practically built in. But when playing make-believe about a fan object, it’s easy to forget that we are playing make-believe games with real pieces. Real people, real business decisions, and real lives are involved.
The nature of fandom means there will always be tension between business imperatives and fan desires because a single object is being used by two very different groups of people for two very different purposes. Owners require the object to make a profit or else their ability to maintain it suffers. Fans require the object to be dependable so they can build fanlike activities around it.
Ordering a Maker’s, neat, in a bar gives off a different set of signals than ordering an inexpensive shot of Old Crow, and a very different set of signals than ordering a Bud Light. If Maker’s Mark is suddenly “worth less,” at least to those in the know, fans look like suckers for having been so devoted. It’s no wonder fans take any affront so personally. Their outrage reflects a feeling of personal betrayal above and beyond the reality of the change.
Fan communities wobble all the time, and 99 percent of the time they eventually self-correct. Star Wars fans decide that even though they hated the prequels, there’s probably no need to burn down George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. The members of a losing political party decide they actually wouldn’t prefer to move to Canada. But it can be difficult to tell when the line between griping and true outrage has been crossed.
Makers’ Mark competitor Jack Daniel’s meets the technical requirements to be a bourbon, although the company prefers to advertise it only as a Tennessee whiskey. And Jack has a similarly rabid fan base. Between 1987 and 2002, Jack Daniel’s lowered the proof of its core product from 90 to 86, and, then, finally to 80 to avoid excise taxes and bring down production costs. A few magazines noticed the change, and there was even a small petition about it, but Jack Daniel’s held firm. The world soon forgot there had ever been a different recipe, and sales were higher than ever.
At what cost did Maker’s Mark appease its fan base? Was there any way this minuscule recipe change might have made less of a splash?
Maker’s Mark comes off the still at 130 proof, which means that, with a final alcohol content of 90 proof, it has already been significantly watered down during the aging process. If a high alcohol content was truly its main selling point, argued food critic Jason Wilson, these fans should have long ago graduated to one of the many higher alcohol bourbons already in existence, like the 107-proof Weller Antique or the 120-proof version of Knob Creek. For that matter, only a tiny portion of bourbon fans drink their alcohol neat. The rest add ice, soda, water, simple syrup, bitters, or juice. The second a single ice cube touches the bourbon, it’s already lower proof than any proposed change.
One thing is certain: Maker’s Mark itself turned the recipe change into an issue at the start, by looping their “Ambassadors” into the discussion. Fans take the word of their fan objects seriously. If the issue was significant enough to merit a special email, it was probably significant enough to get angry about. If Maker’s Mark hadn’t tried so hard to explain itself to fans, it’s possible the update might have gone unnoticed.
Fandom is inherently conservative. It is the nature of fandom to resist innovation, even when it might be for the better. Fans have a close connection to their fan object, and they can be expected to fight against anything that might change the meaning of that connection. Even—and this is important—if no actual physical change has taken place. Many bourbon experts agree that Maker’s Mark probably would have tasted exactly the same, or possibly even better, because a higher alcohol content actually dulls taste buds.
While marketers take the old adage “the customer is always right” to its extreme, academic Stephen Brown argues that in reality “[T]he customer is always right wing—conservative, reactionary, stuck-in-the-mud. . . . They resist change. They inhibit innovation. They want more of the same. They not only venerate the object of their desire, they entomb it in aspic forever and ever, amen.”
In some ways it’s easier to build fanlike activities around a fan object that is no longer alive. It’s easier to collect a full music catalog for a band that’s not constantly adding new albums. It’s easier to memorize all the quotes from characters in a movie that never has a sequel. A fan object with a completed fan text will never change, never betray a trust, never disappoint. Plenty of fans would rather see their fan object dead than dishonored.
By the time Maker’s Mark announced it was reversing its bourbon recipe decision, the fan furor had already started to die down. Tweets had peaked the previous Tuesday. By the following Sunday, when the second email went out, discourse was almost back to preannouncement levels. “They under-reacted to social media at first, then freaked, then maybe over-reacted,” tweeted media commentator Jay Rosen at the time. It’s very possible that, had Maker’s Mark waited a few more days, the outrage might have blown over.
In an ironic twist, the company had its highest grossing quarter ever. Not as a thank-you for retracting their decision, but because fans had scrambled to buy out what they thought would be the last 90-proof bottles. The few 84-proof bottles that were released are expected to become valuable collector’s items.
The Tyranny of the Vocal Minority
When a group rebels, it may seem to the fan-object owner that every last fan is threatening them. Social media swell with angry posts, corporate email boxes flood with ranting letters. Mainstream media write human-interest pieces, almost always with terrible puns in their headlines. Petitions circulate calling for a boycott unless the brand immediately meets fan demands. But often, after the commotion is over, it turns out that the fan rebellion was smaller than it seemed. How is it that a very small group of fans with a minority viewpoint can seem like a huge group of people on the Internet?
Kristina Lerman and a team of computer scientists at the University of Southern California have been trying to find out. They call it the Majority Illusion. In June 2015 they released a paper explaining how it works. Say we have a network of friends. Most of those friends have a couple of other connections, about the same number as we do, but a few “connectors” will have vastly more. If a friend with the usual reach shares a picture of a cat, the number of people who receive the picture will be low. If those people then share it with their own social networks, the chances of overlap will also be low. But if someone with a high number of connections shares it, everyone in the network will receive the picture at once. Anyone they share it with is likely to have seen it already, giving the illusion that everyone in the entire world is suddenly really into cats.
The effect is that social networks, especially digital ones where content travels freely, make it easy to trick people into feeling as though the majority of people share an opinion. Even if, in reality, it’s only shared by a small, well-connected group.
For example, studies suggest that teens are more likely to assume that the majority of their friends consume more alcohol than they actually do. It’s an illusion: the kinds of teens who get invited to wild parties are by definition more likely to have larger groups of friends to do the inviting. They fill their immediate social network, a network that’s much larger than average, with pictures of booze, and suddenly it appears that everyone must be drinking. The effect famously shows up in politics, making extremist views seem more prevalent than they actually are. Explained Lerman in an interview, “As many as 60–70 percent of nodes will have a majority active neighbors, even when only 20 percent of the nodes are active.”
The majority illusion implies that fans who complain the loudest are often the ones it is most important to ignore. Fans almost always have sophisticated platforms in place to express themselves, but the nature of these platforms means that sometimes only those with the strongest, often negative, viewpoints get heard.
This phenomenon was noted by another set of marketing professors writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review in 2011 as they observed the rise of online discussion spaces such as forums and product reviews. While large portions of the population read online reviews before buying a product, significantly fewer customers leave reviews. Generally, reviewers need to feel strongly, either positively or negatively, to share their opinion about something. People with moderate opinions are less likely to bother leaving a product review or to see the need to join in an online conversation about it. Discussions like this have a built-in selection bias.
Compounding the issue, psychological studies have found that the majority of opinions that come from self-proclaimed experts in an area, such as fans, often trend negative. “More involved customers skew their ratings downward to stand out,” explained the researchers. It is much safer to disapprove of something than to risk our reputations by backing an unproven product or idea. The study found that forums where there were both strong positive and negative feelings about a product tended to turn completely negative, and to do so more quickly than groups with customers who had more moderate opinions. It was true even if both groups had the same opinion on average.
Superfans are the definition of an involved audience that has strong opinions and a platform on which to express them. Once sentiment about a topic is trending one way or another, other customers tend to pile on the winning side. A flood of negative comments about a fan object may hide the fact that only a portion of fans hold a negative opinion. It’s very easy for a small group of strong-feeling people to overwhelm a discussion and skew the conversation. Those with more moderate opinions are pushed to the side by the vocal minority.
Maker’s Mark executives may have felt like the entire world had suddenly turned on them, but in reality the outrage likely represented the views of a much smaller percentage of fans.
Handling a Fan Rebellion
When a fan rebellion occurs it needs to be dealt with swiftly, before extremists can intimidate more level-headed fans into silence. That doesn’t mean deleting negative posts or trying to pretend the issue doesn’t exist, nor does it mean capitulating to fan demands. It means acknowledging their concerns, letting fans know their opinions are heard and respected, and offering solutions fast to help mitigate the issue.
The process requires a bit of delicacy and a lot of understanding. Fan demands and opinions need to be taken seriously, but not literally. Those demands are an important marker of how a fan object is perceived, but they may not represent what’s best for a brand. Finding solutions for dealing with demands, ways to satisfy the vocal minority without sacrificing the integrity of the object itself, is of paramount importance.
Often, understanding fan demands is about interpreting what the fans are actually requesting, not what they think they’re requesting. “Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need,” geek icon Joss Whedon famously said. “What they want is for Sam and Diane to get together. . . . Don’t give it to them. Trust me. . . . They need things to go wrong, they need the tension. Things have to go wrong, bad things have to happen.” An audience demanding a certain relationship pairing might actually be asking for more romance in the storyline. An audience that is demanding that a product be colored purple might really be asking for it to look friendlier.
Fans of Whedon’s own TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer demanded a pairing of the show’s two main characters, Buffy, and her gentle love-interest vampire, Angel. So the writers wrote in a single night of bliss . . . before turning Angel into a psychopathic killer. The retail equivalent of this is to offer limited runs of something—superfans can feel empowered to track down the item they demanded, while the rest of the fandom will be unaffected. Offering a special experience to contest winners, offering a one-time screening—these are methods of taking fan demands seriously without allowing the fan object as a whole to be sidetracked.
Why Can’t Spider-Man Be Gay?
The Sony Pictures hack of 2014 contained any amount of titillating gossip. The script for the new James Bond movie was leaked, as were a number of unreleased movies. Salary details showed that female stars were routinely paid less than male ones. Executives referred to Angelina Jolie as a spoiled brat and made racist comments about Barack Obama. No one came away looking very good.
One document immediately caught the public attention—at least, the attention of comics fans. A licensing contract between Sony Pictures and comics giant Marvel laid out all the required traits for Peter Parker (and his secret identity, Spider-Man). Peter Parker does not torture or smoke. He does not kill except in self-defense. He gets his powers from a spider bite. He grew up in New York City. He was raised by his aunt and uncle. He must be male. He must be heterosexual. He must be white.
“But of course Spider-Man is a hetero white guy,” a fan might protest. “I’ve seen the movies and read the comics and he is definitely white.” It’s easy to forget these are made-up characters, subject to the whims of whoever happens to be writing about them at the time. Superheroes in-story regularly change shape, powers, time periods, and dimensions—compared to that, a change in race or sexuality is a relatively easy plot point.
Of course, there are real situations where maintaining a set of characteristics is important to the story. Black Panther would, at the very least, need a name change if he were suddenly Swedish. But there is no in-story purpose for Spider-Man to be white. For that matter, spider bites don’t have a gender preference. And as for being heterosexual, there’s no reason that Spider-Man’s version of New York City couldn’t contain a range of love interests to suit any sexuality. It might even make it more realistic. As one headline put it at the time of the leak, “Spider-Man is contractually obligated to be boring at parties.”
The comics industry has historically come under fire for featuring straight white male characters at the expense of anyone else. There are relatively few examples in comics prior to the early 2000s where female and minority characters weren’t either villains, or where they didn’t end up getting brutalized so that the main character had a motivation to do some righteous butt-kicking. “Black dude dies first” is the name of a media trope going back to the seventies, and killing off female characters in horrible, often sexual ways, is such a common plot device that it’s been given a name: fridging, after a ludicrous 1994 comic where Green Lantern discovers that his girlfriend has been murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. As commentator Andrew Wheeler puts it, “If Marvel makes Thor 3 before it makes Black Panther, it will have made ten movies headlined by blond white men named Chris before it makes one movie headlined by someone who isn’t even white. (They can cast a black actor named Chris. That’s totally OK.)”
It wasn’t always that way, especially not for the industry’s female readership. In the 1930s and ’40s, all types of comics—humor, horror, superhero, and romance—were popular, with some estimates clocking readers in at about 90 percent of American adolescents regardless of gender. The comics-heavy magazine Calling All Girls claimed a distribution of more than half a million—a huge number for a World War II–era population.
In the late forties, a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham began publishing articles and giving talks with names like “Horror in the Nursery” and “The Psychopathy of Comic Books,” culminating in Seduction of the Innocent, a manifesto in which he claimed that comic books lead to evils such as theft, drug use, homosexuality, sexual fetishes, communism, and general mayhem. “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry,” he testified at a US Senate Subcommittee Hearing on Juvenile Delinquency, in one of the first applications of Godwin’s Law. His research was deeply flawed and much of it was outright fraudulent (not to mention, to a modern eye, a bit silly). Nevertheless, the moral panic that followed saw parents’ groups across the country demanding the removal of comics from pharmacies and bookstores. A number of towns held comic-book burnings.
By 1954, the Comics Code Authority had been created to enforce a blandly unobjectionable moral code across the comic-book industry. The terrified publishers were already defending themselves by discontinuing many of their more edgy titles and modifying others so there could be no misunderstanding about their virtuous intent. Heroes became more manly and patriotic; heroines became more docile. The Wonder Woman of the 1940s fights Nazis. But by the sixties, although she continued to be “wonderful,” it wasn’t abnormal to see storylines with titles like “Wonder Woman’s Surprise Honeymoon,” in which the heroine’s prospective bridegroom obsesses about her potential lack of cooking skills.
As comic-book storylines became less friendly to female interests, many female readers moved on to other forms of media. Comics distribution disappeared from mainstream outlets, replaced by specialty comic-book stores that served the now heavily male audience. The new outlets were decidedly masculine, a quality that drove away yet more female readers.
Kelly Sue DeConnick, writer on the popular Captain Marvel superhero comic book series, grew up on an overseas military base. With limited access to American television, the selection of superhero comics at the base’s bookstore was an important link to life back home. But by the early eighties, DeConnick and her fellow female fans found themselves unintentional casualties of the age of specialty comics stores. “There are some really fantastic, really progressive, welcoming comic book stores, where people don’t smell like pot and wear sweatpants,” she says. “But for quite a while, those stores were in the minority.”
By the time big-budget superhero movies began rolling out in the nineties, it was difficult to imagine a significant female audience for them. Ex post facto excuses abounded: Girls didn’t care enough about licensed toys. Girls didn’t spend enough on media. Or one common defense: girls aren’t visual enough (which ignored the success of the fashion and magazine industries). Few people imagined that perhaps girls were nervous about being seen going to movies like that, or that they weren’t interested in another lazily written lady murder. “Women are not drawn to things that are actively insulting to them,” observes DeConnick.
In the nineties, manga—Japanese comics with a wide array of storylines—hit the United States mainstream. With less cultural baggage, they were welcomed by conventional bookstores. “Women and girls started buying manga at $10 a pop. Those books were flying off the shelves. Those books were keeping bookstores in malls open. If you think about that for a moment, Japanese comics have to be read back-to-front, and right-to-left. It was literally easier for these girls to learn to read backwards than it was for them to find their way into American comics,” says DeConnick.
At the same time, the Internet allowed women to find like-minded fans and declare their fandom in safe, supportive spaces. Freed from the necessity of physical comic-book stores, women and girls began buying online comics in hordes. Suddenly, it was very clear that women did like comics after all. For decades, the comic-book industry had been ignoring a huge audience, an audience that was keen to spend money.
Fandom Myopia
The tyranny of the vocal minority is powerful enough to bully a liquor company into making a potentially disastrous business decision, but the effects can be much subtler. Many brands fall into the trap of catering to one fan group to the exclusion of other potential consumers. It’s a mistake to believe that a fan group’s opinions and demands always reflect those of the general public. As Stephen Brown puts it: “Fans, furthermore, are atypical. True, they talk an awful lot; they really, really love the product; and they are nothing if not proactively evangelistic. But they are also self-selected. They are not representative, not even remotely. Their enthusiastically put views are hopelessly distorted, albeit hopelessly distorted in a direction marketers find congenial. Isn’t it great to gather eager followers? Isn’t it wonderful to co-create with our oh-so-articulate customers, as the marketing textbooks recommend? Aren’t we the bees’ knees of branding? The answer, in a nutshell, is NO.”
By the time the comics industry remembered that all kinds of people love comics, the predilections of one very specific demographic had skewed the industry: dark, gritty, masculine. It’s important to note that there was nothing wrong with this per se—many comics from this period are amazing, thoughtful works of art despite their reduced audience appeal. But from a purely moneymaking point of view, limiting their variety was a mistake.
There is nothing altruistic about allowing women and minorities a place in comic books. “They’re companies. They’re companies that have to make a profit. If they’re doing the right thing and maybe not leaving some money on the table, great, everybody wins. But to be sure, it comes down to the notion that, ‘wait, women spend money too?’ ” says DeConnick.
Elsewhere in the world, in places with fewer historical barriers to readership, graphically based books were able to grab significantly more market share. Although the specific cultural causality is difficult to trace, it’s tough to argue with the numbers: in 2014, the Japanese manga market reached 281 billion yen (or about US $2.7 billion). In the United States and Canada that number was a mere $935 million. Japan, with only about a third of the total population, still managed to sell nearly three times the amount of comic books.
Catering to a single, limited fan group may seem attractive because angering the core audience can backfire so spectacularly. As the single-audience model relaxes its stranglehold on the industry, the reaction from the traditional comics fan base has been mixed. It’s still not uncommon for journalists and artists who advocate for diversity in comics to receive harassment or threats. Nevertheless, Thor is currently female. Batwoman is presently bisexual. Ms. Marvel is Muslim-American. Even Archie Comics has a married gay couple. Miles Morales, Marvel’s Spider-Man of African-American and Puerto Rican descent, met with outrage from mainstream comics fans when he first appeared in print in 2011. Peter Parker wasn’t gone for good; he reappeared again within three years of his death, so the Caucasian Spider-Man was in no way imperiled. Still, many fans remained incredulous and angry. Change in a fan object is difficult, and changing the meaning of the fan object is hardest of all. Yet, years later, the Miles Morales character is still popular.
Taking Over Burberry
A person who is hungry has one problem; a person who isn’t hungry has a thousand problems, so the saying goes. A fan object without fans usually has only one goal: creating fans who are motivated enough to “verb” on behalf of the brand. But once the enthusiasm pours in, then what? Creating a fan group is, in a way, the easy part, because it’s the part that’s most controllable. Fan groups backlash against their fan object and pigeonhole it to cater to their very specific wants. Fan-created content, rituals, and other activities can be so good that it becomes unclear which are intended to be canon and which are not, causing legal excitement on all sides.
The more context a fan object has, the more likely the fan community is to take on a life of its own. Fans of Madonna have widely been credited with being instrumental in the advent of third-wave feminism. Superman, with his refugee status and valuable skills, is regularly brought up in immigration debates. Labor-rights advocates, debt-relief campaigners, and politicos from the left and the right often use imagery from the Star Wars movies. It’s common for fans to collude in supporting issues related to their fan object—for example, to bring back a canceled television series (or roll back a hated recipe change).
Underlining these issues lies the problem of hijacking, a phenomenon that has received a lot of attention in recent years. Fans, by definition, repurpose a fan object for personal use, but that doesn’t mean the fan-object owner will always like the use to which the object is put.
Esurance, an Internet-centric insurance company, has a mascot named Erin, a pink-haired spy in a cat suit who tracks down secret insurance deals. Or at least they used to. Erin was a victim of her own success, developing a vocal fan base who created stories and pictures (many of them X-rated) on her behalf. At the height of her popularity, googling Esurance Erin without Safe Search turned on was extremely not safe for work.
A corporate mascot should be recognizable and memorable, but so much depends on what it is being remembered for. British high-fashion brand Burberry became infamous in the early 2000s when its signature checkered plaid design was adopted by the working-class youth population in England derisively referred to as “chavs.” The pattern had previously been used discreetly, as the liner in raincoats and scarves. Chavs used it in everything—hats, pants, skirts, and doggy beds. The American equivalent might be if Brooks Brothers clothing suddenly became immensely fashionable at NASCAR events.
The new fans were unwelcome ones for Burberry. Pubs banned Burberry clothing from their premises; the rich were mortified. As one commentator put it, “Quite a lot of people thought that Bur-berry would be worn by the person who mugged them.” It has taken Burberry over a decade to reclaim ownership over what is still known in many places as “Chav Check.”
Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Hijacking is such a terrifying phenomenon that the smallest possibility is often enough to send brand owners running to their legal departments. Overreactions to completely innocent, or even helpful, fan behavior are a common cause for a fandom to rebel. Many a fan meltdown could have been avoided by a deep breath and five minutes of introspection on the part of the fan object.
In 2014, IKEA, the Swedish-based global furniture company, sent a cease-and-desist letter to a blogger by the name of Jules Yap. Yap ran the extremely popular website IKEAhackers.net, which helped people “hack” IKEA furniture into new, creative, and unexpected designs. The site was already almost a decade old when IKEA’s lawyers demanded that Yap hand over the URL.
When fans act in unexpected, uncontrollable ways, such as using the brand name for their own purposes, the proactive solution is often the same as IKEA’s—to file a legal claim to protect intellectual property. It isn’t a wrong thing to do per se—the legal side of brand management is a serious business—but US trademark and copyright regulations aren’t especially helpful when it comes to managing fan expectations.
“I don’t have an issue with them protecting their trademark but I think they could have handled it better,” Yap told the Washington Post. “I am a person, not a corporation. A blogger who obviously is on their side.” Fans don’t need to be treated with kid gloves, but they do need to be treated differently than people who are trying to make a quick buck. Sending a cease-and-desist to someone squatting on a domain name like IKEA-furniture.com makes sense. In the case of a blogger running a fan site, even one making money off the site, a polite letter opening a conversation might be a better option. Yap’s lawyer was able to negotiate a deal with IKEA allowing her to continue operating the site in a noncommercial fashion, without on-site advertising to support her efforts. As soon as the agreement was made public, fans of the site exploded.
Cory Doctorow, an author and co-editor of Boing Boing, tore into IKEA: “Ikea’s C&D is, as a matter of law, steaming bullshit. There’s no trademark violation here—the use of Ikea’s name is purely factual. The fact that money changes hands on Ikeahackers (which Ikea’s lawyers seem most upset about) has no bearing on the trademark analysis. There is no chance of confusion or dilution from Ikeahackers’ use of the mark. This is pure bullying, an attempt at censorship. . . .”
Less than a week after Yap went public, IKEA was forced to backpedal. “We want to clarify that we deeply regret the situation at hand with IKEAhackers,” IKEA told a reporter at Yahoo. Yap was invited to visit the company’s home offices, and, in a meeting with the CEO—the CEO!—of Inter IKEA Systems B.V., they ultimately forged an agreement allowing Yap to continuing operating the site, ads and all.
“Yay! Pop the lingonberry juice,” Yap wrote.
It was a “routine procedure in defense of trademarks, activated following improper use of the Nutella trademark within the fan page”—that’s what Ferrero, the manufacturer of the hazelnut-chocolate spread Nutella, claimed when they found themselves in a similar situation in 2013.
Nutella’s American Facebook page now has 31 million fans, but for many years, Nutella was a relative unknown in the United States. As an American expat living in Italy in 2007, Sara Rosso, a Nutella superfan, was struck with the lack of attention Nutella received across the Atlantic. “Why weren’t they eating this chocolaty elixir globally?” she asked in a retrospective in 2016. Nutella had almost no online marketing presence in English, and the few Americans who knew about it had to seek it out in specialty grocery stores.
Rosso wanted to evangelize about the gooey spread she loved on a grand scale. Her solution was the creation of World Nutella Day, and a blog to get the word out. It fast became a focal point for food bloggers to send their recipes, songs, poems, videos, and other odes to Nutella. The value to Ferrero was significant; Google searches for Nutella show an ever-steady increase over time, with spikes each February around the holiday, which takes place on the fifth. By early 2012, Rosso and her co-host Michelle Fabio had even published The Unofficial Guide to Nutella, which they claim as the first English-language book on the topic.
The result of Rosso’s efforts was a cease-and-desist order from Ferrero’s legal team, demanding she immediately stop using “the Nutella name, logo or likeness.” Rosso was shocked. “This is something I did as a fan,” she explained to the Huffington Post at the time. “I have a full-time job; I’m not trying to make a business out of this.”
“Cease & desist? How bout I cease & desist buying Ferrero products?!?” wrote fan Dave. Allison, another fan, returned a recently purchased carton to the grocery store. “When they asked me why I returned it I told them about the cease & desist and they said I was not the first person to do this,” she wrote. Mainstream American media, which had happily covered World Nutella Day events for years, jumped on an easy story. Ferrero representatives called Rosso a few days later to back down, allowing the site to continue as it had.
It’s hard to tell what would have happened had Nutella continued with their cease-and-desist. Had the outrage been restricted to superfans, the impact on Ferrero’s bottom line would have been limited. But once it became known to the larger audience, and press outlets picked it up, it became clear that Ferrero had created a public-relations disaster. Their actions made them look like bullies, and self-defeating ones at that. Their explanation, that their own legal department had issued the order without consulting anyone, made them seem soulless and out of touch.
A few minutes of thought and deliberate planning about how to handle situations when fans overstep their bounds would have avoided a huge amount of ill will. Doctorow, today an advocate for copyright and trademark legal reform, points out what is obvious to everyone except, it appears, corporate lawyers: “You can get the same benefit from offering a royalty-free license as you get from threatening a lawsuit.”
Organizations would do well to first try replacing the cease-and-desist approach to fan management with one that brings fans into the fold. If the organization is largely happy with the fan’s activities, it always has the option of making the fan’s activity official. Sometimes giving fans permission to use the trademark, with proper controls and oversight, lets everyone win. If that seems too daring for corporate counsel to accept, there’s always the old fallback: good old-fashioned disclaimers. They might seem boring in a world where threatening cease-and-desist orders are the norm, but they do get the job done. Asking a fan group to make it clear that they aren’t affiliated with or funded by, or have anything at all to do with, the company may make a lot of concerns go away.
Fear is a terrible reason to lash out at the people who love something. And fear also robs the brand owners of the fruits of their labors. Just a few years after their legal kerfuffle, Rosso willingly—and happily—transferred ownership of the now considerably valuable World Nutella Day to the Ferrero Group. She didn’t even ask for compensation (just a donation to the World Food Programme). Choosing to work with, rather than against, their superfan paid off in the long run.
#DoingItRight
When a fan group truly has an axe to grind, there is no good way to head it off. Techniques of appeasement, such as giving something and then taking it away, will only further fuel an “us vs. them” mentality. Fighting for a cause is exciting and romantic, and it’s even more true when one side does indeed have the moral high ground.
It’s important to note that, in many cases, simply acquiescing to fan demands isn’t foolproof either. Despite all of their knowledge, fans don’t know what’s best for their fan object. They only know what’s best for its audience. Often the two are the same, but occasionally they’re not. When a brand placates its fan group by giving in to a demand, everyone will feel really excited and powerful and good about what they’ve done together . . . briefly. Then the fans will lose interest and move on to other exciting issues, while the fan object tries to cope with the long-term consequences of its decision.
In situations where fan dictates simply can’t be met, the best course of action for fan-object owners might be to humanize the situation. To remind fans that there are real human people involved, that they and the fans are all on the same side, that they understand the fans’ concerns, and to explain why they’ve made their decision. It’s important for people to be reminded that both sides of the discussion are made up of fellow fans, wanting to do what’s best for their shared passion.
If fans are able to view the fan-object owner as another member of their fan group instead of a corporate overlord, there’s much less to fear from transparency. As Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams put it in their book Wikinomics, “If you trust your customers, you don’t have to control them.” Fan groups may wobble, but they do tend to right themselves in the end. If an organization has instilled the right social norms into its superfans, it should be able to explain itself as best it can and allow the community to handle it from there. That’s what it’s there for.
Of course as Maker’s Mark proves, that’s not always the case. Sometimes transparency creates trust, but sometimes transparency shatters the thin veneer of authenticity that allows fans to forget that the thing they love is also a commercial product.
The best course in every potentially explosive situation is to think carefully about what that transparency is going to reveal. Owners should decide if it aligns with what they know about their fans’ feelings and motivations. It requires being deliberate. It means considering who these fans are, where they sit within their fan group’s hierarchy, what aspect of their identity is caught up in the fan object, and what they feel they’re getting out of their fanlike activities.
Will this transparency make fans feel like insiders? Or will it make them feel betrayed by the insiders?
Fan groups have a natural life cycle. As fans hit new stages in their lives they will rotate in and out of different fan groups, attaching themselves to new objects that better serve their new needs. This is okay. Fans are wonderful, and inspiring, and enriching, and enraging. When they decide to leave a fan group because their fan object has changed over time, as it must, it’s natural to feel personally rejected. It’s easy for fan-object owners to get caught up in a spiral: Could we have fixed things? Were they being unreasonable? If only we hadn’t done that one thing maybe they’d still love us. Breakups are always hard. It’s all right to hide under the metaphorical covers with a pint of ice cream until the feelings go away.
But it’s important to remember this too shall pass. There will be new fans, fans who are a perfect fit. Fans who will find in the same fan object the answer to their questions about self-identity, and community, and rebellion, and ideology.
These are fans who will complete their first serious fanlike activity, and who will rush on to the next one full of the enthusiasm at their brush with something that makes them feel like a better version of themselves. Or something that told the world about who they wanted to be. Or maybe just something that was a lot of fun. And perhaps they will write excitedly in their diary that night, as Alice Drake did so long ago, “I never tho’t I would do that!”