How Does Fans Economy Change Products?

Many people such as superstars, personages and political figures have a lot of loyalty fans. Now the author prefers to take communities and fans as a social capital produced by internet, which includes brand values but has more value than brand itself, and, obviously, it will change the cost structure of products.

Social Capital
At first, Let’s make an assumption that without the internet how does a company with good brand image deliver its information?

Information delivering is passive triggered at the era without internet. It’s general for them to think of some brands while they need something. They have to repeat their previous marketing methods when they have the demand to deliver new product information to public people such as several advertisements or deliver leaflets.

Things changed after internet appeared. Most of people still pay attention to new product in passive triggered model, but it becomes possible for actively noticing between people and people and also between people and information.

Crossing the Chasm has divided users into five types: technology enthusiasts, product adopters, pragmatists, onservatives and skeptics. It means when pragmatists accept the products, the product will in main markets. The key point is that there is a big chasm between product adopters and pragmatists. The reality is that the chasm will vanish with traditional marketing methods and 100 thousand loyalty fans. Fans will focused on your product development and deliver the product experiences actively, which means you have to pay more attention to your product values. The whole thing is not simply equal to brand values. There are a lot of things happened between products and fans. From commercial angle, that is a new channel which will affect ads, media and even Inventory. That’s why we define community and fans as a social capital before.

Fan’s anti-commercial nature
Only emotion can gain attention actively and bring fans. Same as most of people are willing to pay attention to their kids but they pay a little attention to next door even it get fire. But the nature of commercial is benefit, instead of emotion. It looks strange that the businessman owned fans.

If we want to find out the origin of fans, we should have the knowledge of products level. There are rational, aesthetic and emotion.

The first level, product take some special function as the entry point to solve people specific needs. Product is tool.

PC, printers, photocopiers or Word are such tools like this. Evaluating them at this level depends on rational. Most of products are at this level. Cost performance emphasizes the differences with other similar products.

The second level, except the function, aesthetic is added. Luxuries are sold in this way. The practice of electronics products stems from Apple, which did a good job in business success.

The third level, emotion added at products based on the first two levels. Kant said, aesthetic is the bridge between the cold real world and moral emotion world. Anyway, the source of emotion is very complicated, not only from aesthetic. But the extreme aesthetic must derive from emotion dependence.

These three levels can play a role together, but the real level to accumulate social capital is the third one. Marketing played a subtle character in this process. If including the marketing too much, it’s easy to let people feel you are fake. And in this world that information is more balanced, fake will be rapidly puncture, which will damage its social capital in turn. So the premise of marketing is good faith.  

All in all, the launch threshold of fans economy is too high. The reality is utilitarian. Aesthetic has to spend a lot of money without the accurate answer that customers will agree with it. By the way, it’s not easy for a product with the element of emotion.