Why Some Brands Need Fans More Than Customers

Apr 22, 2026

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The strange business of being loved

What if the most powerful thing a brand can do is not sell a product, but create a reason for people to keep talking about it after the purchase? That question sounds like marketing fluff until you look at two very different kinds of cultural products: a coffee brand tied to a huge personal following, and a film studio that learned how to make movies feel like membership cards. In both cases, the real product is not just coffee or cinema. It is participation.

That matters because participation and profitability are not the same thing. A product can be adored, widely discussed, and consistently purchased, yet still fail as a business. Another can spend relatively little on traditional advertising, generate a cult following, and become far more durable because it knows how to convert attention into identity. The deeper tension here is simple but brutal: love is not a business model unless it can survive without constant emotional fuel.

The internet has blurred the line between audience and market, but it has not erased economics. In fact, it has made the trap more seductive. A creator with millions of followers can assume that a product attached to their name will inherit trust, demand, and loyalty. Sometimes it does. But if the product depends on the creator’s ongoing visibility, personal enthusiasm, and constant promotion, then the business may be less like a company and more like a performance that never closes.

The hidden mismatch between attention and margins

Coffee is an especially revealing case because it looks simple from the outside. People buy it every day. The category is familiar. The product can be excellent. There is repeat demand. On paper, that sounds like the ideal consumer business. In practice, it is one of the most unforgiving categories imaginable: thin margins, high competition, commodity pricing pressure, and rising overhead that can erase enthusiasm very quickly.

That is the first big lesson: high demand does not automatically mean high business quality. A product can be popular and still be structurally fragile. If the category itself has weak margins, then the brand needs enormous scale, unusually efficient operations, or some other economic moat to avoid getting squeezed. A creator brand often begins with attention, but attention is not the moat. Attention is the ignition. The engine still has to run.

This is where many influencer-led products hit the wall. The audience may be genuine, but the economics remain stubborn. If the product relies on the founder to continually sell it through their own channel, the company has not escaped the creator economy. It has merely become a more expensive extension of it. The business works while the founder’s spotlight is bright, and then starts to wobble the moment that energy shifts elsewhere.

There is an important distinction here between audience capture and category capture. Audience capture means your followers will support whatever you make, at least for a while. Category capture means you have built something people want even when your name is not in front of them. The first is emotionally flattering. The second is economically resilient.

Think of the difference like this: an audience is a crowd at a concert. A category is the habit that survives when the concert ends. If your product only lives in the arena, it dies when the lights go out.

A24 and the art of making the conversation part of the product

The most interesting counterexample is not a coffee brand. It is a film studio that understood something many consumer brands miss: the experience does not end at the point of consumption. With the right cultural product, the aftermath is part of the value.

A certain kind of cinema became a brand because it treated conversation as an extension of the work. The films were not merely meant to be watched. They were meant to be interpreted, memed, analyzed, quoted, and passed around. The company spent less on traditional advertising and more on making the films feel like events that people wanted to discover, discuss, and signal affiliation with. In effect, it did what the old brand playbook could not: it turned the audience into a distribution layer.

That is the quiet genius of post-consumption design. The product is built so that people want to talk about it after they use it. This creates a loop where the act of sharing becomes part of the consumption itself. You do not just buy the movie ticket or drink the coffee. You buy a story about yourself: I get this, I was here first, I am part of this taste community.

This is where the connection between cult cinema and creator products becomes more interesting than it first appears. Both are selling more than the object. Both are selling identity with a receipt attached. But one of them tends to be much better at letting the product stand on its own. A film can generate a conversation without needing the director to be personally present at every screening. A coffee bag cannot always do that. If the coffee needs the founder’s face in every feed, the brand has not yet become a brand. It is still a fandom.

The most durable brands do not just attract attention. They convert attention into a social ritual that continues without constant intervention.

That is the real divide. Not fame versus anonymity. Not scale versus intimacy. It is whether the product can become a ritual rather than a reminder.

The three layers of a modern brand

To understand why some products thrive while others stall, it helps to use a simple framework with three layers:

1. Attention layer

This is where the product gets noticed. Social posts, founder charisma, controversy, novelty, aesthetics, and algorithmic reach live here. Many creator brands are excellent at this layer.

2. Usage layer

This is whether the product is actually good enough to earn repeat purchase. Quality, price, convenience, and experience matter here. Without this layer, attention evaporates.

3. Identity layer

This is where the product becomes socially meaningful. People buy it not only because it works, but because it says something about them. It becomes a marker of taste, belonging, or status.

The mistake is thinking a strong attention layer can substitute for the other two. It cannot. But the even subtler mistake is thinking the usage layer is enough. It often is not. A product can be excellent and still disappear if it fails to enter the identity layer or build a conversation loop around itself.

A24 understood that a movie could function as all three. The poster, the trailer, the style, the casting, the online discourse, the fan decoding, all of it reinforced the same signal: this is not just content, this is culture. Meanwhile, many creator products only partially clear the first hurdle. They get noticed because the founder is famous, then struggle to translate that attention into a self-sustaining identity outside the founder’s constant presence.

The hard truth is that most businesses do not fail because people hate them. They fail because people stop thinking about them. In crowded markets, forgettability is deadlier than criticism.

Why passion matters, but not in the way people think

There is a romantic idea in entrepreneurship that passion is what makes a business succeed. That is true only in a narrow sense. Passion does not create profit by itself. What it really does is supply the stamina required to survive a business that has unpleasant economics, slow compounding, and a lot of invisible labor.

That is why some products work only when the founder truly wants to live inside them. If your deepest creative satisfaction comes from making videos, then building a low-margin packaged good may feel like a detour from your actual calling. You may still be able to do it. You may even make it look easy. But the burden of operations, inventory, margins, distribution, and scale will slowly expose whether the business is a side quest or a vocation.

This is not just a question of taste. It is a question of structural honesty. A founder who loves the product category can endure the slow, repetitive, non-glamorous work of making it better. A founder who loves the audience may still be able to sell the product, but may hate the machinery required to make it profitable. That mismatch is often fatal.

The key insight is that passion is not primarily about inspiration. It is about tolerance for the ugly middle. Every brand has an ugly middle, where the logo looks good but the unit economics are not, where demand exists but scale is hard, where the market loves the idea but the operation hates the cash flow. Passion decides whether the founder can keep going long enough to repair the machine.

The new rule: build something people can finish and still keep using

What connects the cult film studio and the struggling creator coffee brand is not just that both are attention-based. It is that both reveal a broader rule for modern commerce: the strongest products do not end at purchase. They create a second life.

That second life can take different forms. It can be conversation, as with films. It can be habit, as with daily-use products that become rituals. It can be status, as with apparel. It can be community, as with fandom-driven subscriptions. But if the product stops at the transaction, the company has to keep paying to restart the relationship every single time.

This is why some categories are so much friendlier to creator-led brands than others. Apparel can become identity quickly. A snack can become a cult object if the taste is distinctive and the packaging is emotionally sticky. Coffee, by contrast, often gets trapped in the most punishing part of the market: everyone understands it, everyone compares it, and very few buyers are emotionally loyal enough to ignore price and convenience forever.

In other words, the question is not simply, “Will people buy this?” The better question is, “What happens in the customer’s mind after they buy this?” If the answer is nothing, then the business is forced to win the sale all over again. If the answer is, “I told someone about it, I identified with it, I started using it differently, I felt part of something,” then the brand has escaped the pure transaction.

The best brands are not remembered as purchases. They are remembered as experiences that changed how people talked, thought, or belonged.

That is the hidden advantage of the cultural product. It creates not just repeat purchase, but repeat meaning.

Key Takeaways

Attention is not a moat. A large following can create a fast launch, but it does not guarantee durability, margins, or independence from the founder.
The best products create a second life. If people keep talking, sharing, or signaling after they buy, the product becomes harder to forget and easier to scale.
Category matters as much as brand. Some markets, like coffee, are brutally competitive and margin-thin. Even a beloved product can struggle if the category economics are poor.
Passion is operational stamina. It matters less as inspiration and more as the willingness to endure the messy middle of logistics, pricing, and scale.
Build for ritual, not just recognition. The strongest brands become habits, symbols, or conversations, not just things people once saw online.

The real test of a brand

The modern temptation is to confuse visibility with viability. If enough people know your name, it feels as if the business must be working. But a brand that depends on ongoing spectacle is not fully built. It is being continuously reintroduced to the market. That can be exciting, and it can even be profitable for a while, but it is fragile.

The deeper lesson is that the most valuable products are not simply those that sell well. They are the ones that become culturally autonomous. They can survive a quieter founder, a smaller budget, or a less frequent promotional push because they have embedded themselves in a habit, a taste, or a conversation that outlives the campaign.

So the question is not whether to build for fans or customers. It is whether you are building something that can graduate from one to the other. Fans are a beginning. Customers are a metric. But the real achievement is making something that people adopt into their lives so naturally that it no longer needs your daily performance to justify its existence.

That is the bar. Not fame. Not even demand. Self-sustaining meaning.

And once you see that, you start to recognize why some brands feel like movements while others feel like merch tables. One survives because it keeps asking for attention. The other survives because people have already made it part of who they are.