Fangame Netnography: When Brand Hijack Fosters Brand Revitalization

Like any other organism, brands are subject to a cycle of adaptions, transformations, and evolutions. To manage their life cycle brands can enact revitalization strategies (Dion & Mazzalovo, 2016). However, alterations can be done by consumers who take ownership of brand meanings, values, symbols, and offerings. In some extreme cases of appropriation, brands are hijacked by consumers (Wipperfürth, 2005). Extant literature on brand revitalization and brand hijack have been developed as two separate bodies. But are these two phenomena truly separated? Our research investigates how a brand hijack can lead to and even speed up brand revitalization. We explore the micro-creative forces and social powers that are in actions and come to interplay when a declining brand is hijacked by consumers. For our study we have chosen the brand Festival di Sanremo. Although the Festival represents the major singing event in Italy and an iconic brand platform that is capable of mobilizing cultural, business, and media attention, it has been facing a major decline. Starting from 2022, a fantasy fan- made game – FantaSanremo – in which players create teams out of the competing artists to gain bonuses and maluses, which are awarded based on actions performed by the artists or events during the Festival, has been capable of shaking the dust out of the Festival. Considering the social and conversational essence of the dynamics activated by the Festival and FantaSanremo, we are conducting a longitudinal netnography (Kozinets, 2020) to unpack how brand hijack can lead to an immediate revitalization of a declining brand. We engaged in an immersive and multimodal collection of the digital traces of the interactions that FantaSanremo generated since its inception. In our investigative phase, we started with retrieving FantaSanremo archival material published from February 2022 to 2024. We followed FantaSanremo owned channels. We generated a set of hashtags that we used to locate relevant social media discussions, topics, users, artists, celebrities, influencers, brands, and sponsors. We collected data from Instagram, TikTok, X, Telegram, Youtube, Facebook, and Threads. This investigation led us to uncover broad networks of interplays among the actors involved in the fan-game and Festival experience that continuously expanded the boundaries of our data site mapping, making us wonder if web crawling/scraping tools were necessary to optimize and complete our data collection. We kept immersion journals and we produced thoroughly curated multi-textual artifacts that facilitated comparisons, reflections, and interpretations. To better understand how Fantasanremo has altered how the Festival is perceived and experienced we designed an interactive phase in which we created Whatsapp groups where we collected real-time observational and interactive data with selected participants, who have created their FantaSanremo teams. We also took part in the live Telegram group dedicated to Fantasanremo. Our longitudinal netnography is still under construction and we are now collecting data from edition FantaSanremo2024 to investigate over a broader span of time the trajectory of appropriation, friction, and co-option that are at play in the revitalization of the Festival di Sanremo brand.