Fandom Has More Than One Front Door

Hi friends,

In 2006, Germany hosted the FIFA World Cup. I was living there at the time and, despite being German, had very little interest in soccer. I watched the occasional game, knew the big names, but I definitely wasn’t what anyone would call a fan.

Then I went to the FIFA Fan Fest in Hamburg.

I honestly don’t remember which match was playing that day. What I remember is everything around it: thousands of people from all over the world, flags everywhere, food and drinks, music, people singing, strangers hugging after goals, and an energy that seemed to take over the entire city. You didn’t really need to understand soccer to understand that something special was happening. I went because it looked like fun, stayed because of the atmosphere, and somewhere along the way started caring about what was happening on the screen.

Twenty years later, I’m a big soccer fan (I also believe that Germany will win its next World Cup under Klopp within the next 8 years but that’s for another newsletter).

What I didn’t know at the time was that Germany 2006 was the first official FIFA Fan Fest program. FIFA had noticed fans gathering spontaneously to watch games during the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan and formalized the idea four years later across all German host cities. More than 18 million visits were recorded during the tournament. FIFA’s own history of the program makes an interesting point: the gatherings showed that people wanted to experience the World Cup as a cultural event with friends and family. It was about more than just football.

Apparently, I was exactly the kind of person the format could reach.

The community got me before the sport did.

There is some pretty interesting science behind why that happens. Researchers studying basketball fans compared people attending games inside a stadium with groups watching the same games remotely. The people physically inside the stadium showed greater synchrony in their physiological responses, and that shared response was associated with a more transformative experience and stronger identification with the group. Interestingly, simply being more excited wasn’t enough to explain the effect. What mattered was the shared arousal between people experiencing the event together.

Anyone who has stood in a stadium when the home team scores probably doesn’t need a scientific paper to tell them this. But I like the implication: the crowd isn’t just the audience for the experience. The crowd is part of the experience.

That is what Fan Fests figured out very early.

Twenty years later, right back where we started

There is a nice full-circle element to this for me. This summer, Solomon Group served as executive producer of the FIFA Fan Festival in Atlanta. For 19 days, Centennial Olympic Park became a huge gathering place for the World Cup, combining live matches with concerts, food and beverage, activations and family entertainment. More than 500,000 people came through, averaging over 27,000 visitors a day and making Atlanta one of the most-attended FIFA Fan Festivals in the U.S.

What makes Atlanta particularly interesting for this conversation is what sits right next door: the World of Coca-Cola.

We have also spent the last several years working with Coca-Cola on the ongoing evolution of its flagship brand home, including Scent Discovery, Beverage Lab and Coca-Cola Stories as part of a broader multi-year revitalization.

So within a few minutes’ walk in downtown Atlanta you have two very different manifestations of fandom. One appeared for a few weeks around the biggest sporting event in the world. The other is a permanent destination built around one of the most recognized consumer brands on earth. However, they are less than different than they may seem.

Both have a core property at the center. For FIFA, it is obviously soccer. For World of Coca-Cola, it is Coca-Cola. But the core property alone isn’t necessarily what gets everyone through the door. My own World Cup experience is a pretty good example. I entered through the atmosphere, the people, the food and the fun. Soccer was waiting for me once I got inside.

That is how we should think about brand homes as well.

Give people a reason to come in

When we worked on Coca-Cola Stories, we didn’t start by asking what else Coca-Cola wants to say about itself, nor did we start with a designer’s favorite idea or the latest piece of technology. We started more broadly: what are people actually choosing to spend their time and money on, what is working in the attractions market, where are the gaps, and what kind of experience would make someone think, I want to do that.

From there, the job is to create something genuinely compelling for the guest that Coca-Cola can uniquely own. That is an important distinction. A brand home still needs to feel unmistakably like the brand, but the brand cannot be the only reason the experience exists. And great design matters enormously, but design for design’s sake is not the objective either. The goal is to create a great experience first, then use the brand, story and design to make that experience uniquely yours.

The distinction may sound small, but I think it changes the brief considerably. A brand home should certainly tell the brand story, but people generally don’t wake up in the morning desperately hoping to learn more corporate history. They do wake up wanting to have a great day with their family, discover something new, taste something they can’t taste elsewhere, play, be surprised or experience something worth telling their friends about.

That is where experiences such as Scent Discovery and Beverage Lab become interesting. The invitation isn’t simply to come learn about Coca-Cola. You get to explore scent, experiment with beverages and interact with something. The brand story is still there, but it is delivered through an experience people actually want to have.

Curiosity may be particularly powerful here. Researchers at UC Davis found that people in a state of high curiosity were better at remembering the information they wanted to learn and, interestingly, also showed improved memory for incidental information they encountered while curious. There are obviously limits to how broadly we should apply a laboratory study, but the principle is useful: getting someone genuinely curious may make them more receptive to everything that comes with the experience.

In other words, the best way to tell someone your story is to first give them a reason to want to hear it.

Fandom has more than one front door

This is also something we increasingly see in sports. The match remains the center of gravity, but the ecosystem around it is much larger. Music, food, fashion, collectibles, creators, athletes, hospitality, gaming and shared rituals can all become entry points. Some people arrive as lifelong fans. Others arrive because their friends brought them, because they like the artist performing that night or because the event taking over their city simply looks like somewhere they want to be.

The smartest Fan Fests understand this. They don’t dilute the sport by adding those things. They create more ways into the sport.

The same logic applies to brands. Someone may enter through history, but they might equally enter through design, technology, taste, art, play, hospitality or a great family experience. Once the relationship starts, the brand has an opportunity to deepen it.

That is why I increasingly think of Fan Fests and brand homes less as separate categories and more as infrastructure for fandom.

Fan Fests are incredibly good at turning shared passion into community and giving that community a place to gather. Brand homes can turn curiosity and existing affinity into participation, discovery and a deeper relationship with the brand. In both cases, the experience can serve existing superfans while also creating low-friction entry points for everyone standing just outside the ecosystem.

And that second group may ultimately be the more interesting one. We spend a lot of time talking about how to engage fans. Maybe we should spend a little more time thinking about how people become fans in the first place.

For me, it happened at a FIFA Fan Fest in Germany twenty years ago. I came for the experience and eventually stayed for the sport.

There is a pretty simple lesson in that: Fandom has more than one front door, great experiences open more of them.

Daniel Hettwer

Chief Strategy Officer, Solomon Group