By Eli Haddow | Associate Director of Marketing

A few seasons ago, the New Orleans Pelicans made an unlikely playoff run. They'd clawed their way through the play-in tournament and kept winning longer than anyone expected.  

Then they lost.

Mel Barry, who oversees marketing for both the Pelicans and the Saints, watched from inside the arena as the crowd remained in the arena, providing a standing ovation as the players walked off the court.

“If you were just there because you wanted to see us win,” Barry told me, “sorry, that wasn't going to be it. But if you were there because you wanted to feel a part of something bigger…I think that's why they stayed.”

I was in the Smoothie King Center that night, and the pride was palpable. I can remember how it felt to end this ride with the team after watching them fight for the city game after game.

Barry’s story reminded me that fandom has nothing to do with winning. It goes far beyond winning.  

To understand how fandoms actually move, I wanted to speak with those who work with them for a living.

Barry came to sports marketing after nearly a decade working agency-side on Broadway in New York. Robert Diamond founded BroadwayWorld in 2003, and has grown it into the largest theater and live entertainment website in the world, covering productions in 100 cities, 40 countries and 20 languages.

Between them, they’ve spent their careers in two of the oldest fandom industries on earth, and neither of them got there by thinking about fandom the way most marketers do.

You Can Join. You Can't Own.

The first thing both Diamond and Barry made clear is that fandom doesn’t belong to the organization that benefits from it. PETERMAYER’s Brand Joy Lab research bears this out: brands that try to manage or reframe fan communities around brand objectives tend to get rejected, not because fans are anti-brand, but because the attempt at ownership threatens something the community values more than brand involvement.  

Fans connect with each other first, then the brand.

Barry's playoff story illustrates what it looks like when an organization understands this. The Pelicans didn't retain that crowd on the strength of the final score. They spent years building something around the team that gave fans a reason to be there beyond winning. The game was almost beside the point.

Diamond describes the same dynamic from the Broadway side. Shows build fandoms because they create space for theater people to come together. It’s a phenomenon going back thousands of years.

“There's always something about getting people together in a room,” he said, “and the energy of an audience. That's kind of an evergreen thing.”

The brands that earn entry into fandoms are the ones who show up to celebrate this forming of community rather than take it over.

Loyalty Requires Constant Re-Earning

Diamond described the economics of Broadway with a clarity that should give brand marketers pause. A show has roughly 1,500 seats to fill every night. Last night’s standing ovation doesn’t carry over.

“It goes back to zero every day,” he said.

Barry has a version of this story, too. When Drew Brees retired, the Saints lost more than a quarterback. Following several seasons with a stellar record, fans and season ticket holders had to wonder what was next for the first time in a while.  

“Those are the things you can't really control,” Barry said. “But hopefully the other things happening around the brand are things that people enjoy being a part of.”

Diamond offers this advice to brands: Think about trying to fill a room with thousands of people day after day. How would you behave to draw people in? What experiences, physical or digital, would you create to keep coming back?

When brands think about building fandoms, that mindset will separate those that are there for quick conversion and those invested in building something.  

Build for the Worst Night, Not the Best One

Neither Diamond nor Barry can guarantee their core product delivers on any given night. A lead actor can be sick. A team can lose. They’ve both built experiences around the performance, not based on its outcome.

For the Pelicans, that means weaving the culture of New Orleans so thoroughly into every game experience that attending a loss still feels like participating in something that belongs to the city. For Broadway productions like Chess, which Diamond cited as a recent success story, it means finding cast members whose personalities become the on-ramp for audiences who might not care much about the show itself.

“Chess flopped on Broadway in the '80s,” Diamond noted. “It's an iconic cult favorite of theater fans, but not really known by mass audiences. And the current production has created a look of being a cool, fun, hip thing, really through the cast leaning into social media in an authentic way.”

The lesson here goes beyond social strategy. If your fan experience only works when your product is excellent, you haven't built a fandom. Barry put the goal plainly: fans should “still have confidence in the organization” and “still have a desire to be a part of whatever it is,” even when the outcome goes the wrong way.

Narrow First, Then Broad

One of the more persistent myths in brand marketing is that fandom scales through reach. Get enough people to care a little, and eventually some of them care a lot. Both Diamond and Barry describe something closer to the opposite in practice.

The Pelicans’ HBCU and Divine Nine night event started modestly, as a group ticket package with a pregame happy hour. Barry watched it grow season over season.

“Fans are so proud of their schools. They are so proud of their Greek organizations. All of this pride was so, so cool to see come to life in the Smoothie King Center.”  

It grew because it tapped into something real and specific. The Pelicans gave the event more space to breathe, built more experiences around it, and watched it grow into a seasonal phenomenon.

Diamond made a related point about IP-driven Broadway shows. Conventional wisdom says the pre-built fandom is the advantage. Harry Potter and Stranger Things arrive with audiences already attached. But Diamond pushes back on this. Those shows face their own challenge, he argues: convincing someone to pay $250 for a ticket to something they can stream for free.  

For lesser-known properties, absolute focus on the Broadway experience matters before they think about scaling to a larger tour.  

“They're going, we want everybody to come to New York and just think about New York,” says Diamond. “We're just talking about New York and that's all there is.”

Brands can learn from this mentality. If you think of your entire world as that theater—those seats you need to fill night after night—it will clarify the stakes. Earn the absolute love of a few at a time, until those few become many.

PETERMAYER's data confirms the underlying mechanics. Die-hard fans are more likely to notice brand involvement, more influenced by it, and more likely to carry brands into the world through their own networks. The path to broad fandom tends to run through something narrow and deeply felt first.

The Brand as Host

The brands that succeed in fandom play the role of host, rather than the star.

Barry reflected on this toward the end of our conversation, drawing on her experience across both Broadway and sports: “There has to be a level of integrity to whatever it is that we do, so that you feel like you had a good time, like it was worth your time.”

No matter where you reach your fandoms or grow them, the experience must resonate with the core of the brand.

Diamond put a practical frame around the same idea. "A brand can't necessarily have 1,500 people a night together in a theater," he said. "But what is the digital alternative of that, of getting your superfans to engage with each other? Turning them into brand ambassadors."

They both describe a shift in mindset from performer to host. This is harder to measure than impressions or reach. It requires patience, specificity, and a willingness to build something that serves the fan before it serves the brand. It asks organizations to set the stage rather than stand in the spotlight.

PETERMAYER's Brand Joy Lab found that 1 in 3 American adults already describes themselves as a die-hard fan of something. They're organized around passion and looking for community. They stayed in their seats and clapped for a team that just lost in the first round. The room, in other words, is already full. The question for brands is whether they're willing to do the work to deserve a place in it.

Data referenced in this article is drawn from PETERMAYER's Brand Joy Lab, a monthly survey of 400+ U.S. adults totaling more than 12,000 responses.