Businesses spend enormous amounts of time trying to create customer loyalty. They build rewards programs, send personalized offers, develop social media strategies, and look for ways to persuade customers to return.
Anime offers a different model.
The most dedicated anime fans aren’t simply repeat customers. They recommend series to friends, debate characters online, create fan art, dress as favorite characters, collect merchandise, attend conventions, and build friendships around their shared interests. In the process, audiences become participants in the culture surrounding the product.
For anime enthusiast Elijah Ladapo, who has attended conventions and participated in cosplay himself, that distinction is significant. He sees some of the strongest fan communities as evidence that loyalty becomes much more powerful when people are given something they genuinely want to participate in.
“There’s a huge difference between liking a show and feeling connected to the community around it,” Ladapo says. “When people start recommending a series to friends, going to conventions, creating things, or dressing as characters they love, they’re doing much more than consuming entertainment. They’re making it part of their own experience.”
For businesses outside entertainment, the lesson isn’t to imitate anime fandom. It’s to understand why participation can create a kind of loyalty that discounts and rewards programs struggle to reproduce.
Fans Help Create the Community
Traditional marketing usually assumes fairly distinct roles. A company creates something, promotes it, and sells it. The customer buys it.
Fandom makes those boundaries considerably less clear.
An anime studio creates the original work, but fans generate much of the activity that keeps it circulating between official releases. They post reviews and reactions. They recommend series. They debate plot developments. Artists create their own interpretations of characters. Cosplayers can spend weeks or months designing costumes before wearing them to an event.
That activity isn’t insignificant.
A 2024 study highlighted by Crunchyroll surveyed 4,275 U.S. adults, including 2,049 people who had watched anime. Among anime viewers, 47% said they recommended anime to someone at least once a month. Another 46% visited an online anime community, group, or forum at least monthly, while 46% shared anime-related content on social media with the same frequency.
Perhaps even more telling, friends were by far the most common introduction to anime. Fifty-three percent of viewers said friends had introduced them to it.
For a business, that’s an enviable position: customers voluntarily introducing new customers to the product because sharing it is enjoyable in its own right.
Give People Something Worth Talking About
Word of mouth is sometimes discussed as though it were simply another marketing channel.
That overlooks why people recommend things.
Most of us don’t tell friends about a product because we want to help the company meet its quarterly objectives. We do it because the recommendation says something about us, helps someone we care about, or gives us something interesting to discuss together.
Anime makes this visible.
Ask an enthusiastic fan what someone should watch next and you’re unlikely to receive a disinterested answer. Recommendations can depend on whether the person likes martial arts, comedy, fantasy, romance, science fiction, complex world-building, or long character-development arcs.
The recommendation itself becomes part of the enjoyment.
Businesses can learn something from that. Rather than continually asking how to persuade customers to talk about a brand, it may be more useful to ask whether the company has created anything customers would naturally want to discuss.
Sometimes that means an exceptional product. Sometimes it’s expertise people find useful, an experience worth remembering, or a shared interest that gives customers a reason to interact with one another.
Community works best when conversation doesn’t have to be forced.
Elijah Ladapo: Participation Deepens the Connection
Cosplay takes this principle much further.
Watching a character requires relatively little from an audience member. Portraying that character at a convention is an entirely different level of involvement.
Fans research costumes, assemble clothing and accessories, practice poses, take photographs, interact with other cosplayers, and sometimes learn creative skills along the way. The intellectual property provides the starting point, but fans contribute their own effort and personality to the experience.
Ladapo has experienced that transition firsthand through portraying Afro Samurai at conventions.
“Cosplay changes your relationship with a character because you’re participating instead of watching,” he says. “You’re surrounded by other people who understand the reference and are excited about it too. Someone you’ve never met can recognize the character, start a conversation, and suddenly there’s a connection because you both care about the same thing.”
Research suggests that this type of participation is far from unusual within anime fandom. Among anime viewers surveyed in the 2024 study, 40% reported dressing in cosplay at least once a year, while the same percentage said they attended an anime convention at least annually.
Another study involving more than 1,000 anime convention attendees examined what happened when those physical gatherings disappeared during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Researchers found a strong emphasis among respondents on the importance of conventions as physical community spaces, underscoring that their value extends beyond simply promoting entertainment.
Physical Experiences Still Matter
That’s particularly interesting in an era when fandom can exist almost entirely online.
Anime fans can stream a show at home, discuss it on social media, order merchandise online, and communicate with other fans without ever being in the same room.
Yet conventions continue to attract substantial crowds.
There’s a reason for that.
Physical events turn an abstract audience into a visible community. Thousands of individuals who may normally experience their interest privately suddenly find themselves surrounded by people who recognize the same characters, understand the same references, and care about the same fictional worlds.
The commercial activity surrounding these events is substantial. Fans purchase artwork, figures, clothing and collectibles. Publishers and studios promote upcoming releases. Artists meet customers. Sponsors gain access to highly engaged audiences.
But focusing exclusively on transactions misses part of the value.
People also leave with photographs, conversations, friendships, recommendations, and memories. Those experiences can deepen their relationship with the interest that brought them there in the first place.
Businesses don’t necessarily need conventions, but many can benefit from thinking more seriously about opportunities for customers to encounter one another rather than interacting exclusively with the company.
Identity Is More Powerful Than a Transaction
Collectibles and merchandise reveal another dimension of fandom.
Why does someone want a figure of a character sitting on a shelf? Why wear a shirt featuring a favorite series? Why hang artwork on a wall?
The practical utility of these objects doesn’t fully explain their appeal.
They communicate identity.
A Dragon Ball shirt can remind someone of watching Goku as a child. A figure can represent a favorite story or character. A convention badge can become a reminder of a weekend spent with friends.
The commercial significance is considerable. The Association of Japanese Animations estimated the broader anime market at a record 3.84 trillion yen in 2024, with the overseas market reaching approximately 2.17 trillion yen and substantially exceeding the domestic market.
The scale of that industry demonstrates the economic power of fandom, but the underlying relationship is what businesses should notice.
The strongest communities give people ways to express something about themselves.
Community Can’t Simply Be Manufactured
There is an important warning in all of this.
Businesses have noticed the commercial value of community, and as a result, the word has become overused. A company’s customers don’t automatically become a “community” because the marketing department calls them one.
People need an actual reason to connect.
Anime has an advantage because stories naturally provide shared material. Fans can discuss characters, argue about plot decisions, recommend shows, compare interpretations, create artwork, and anticipate what happens next.
Companies in other industries have to discover what genuinely connects their customers.
For an outdoor company, that might be a shared enthusiasm for particular activities. For an educational organization, it could be a desire to develop a skill. A software company might have customers who enjoy helping one another solve difficult technical problems.
The common ingredient is value between members, not simply value flowing from the company to the customer.
If every interaction ultimately amounts to “buy something from us,” the relationship remains transactional regardless of what it’s called.
Loyal Communities Have a Life of Their Own
Perhaps the most useful lesson from anime fandom is that the strongest communities eventually develop some independence from the organizations that helped create them.
Fans make recommendations the studio didn’t ask them to make. They organize viewing parties. They create art. They build online groups. They attend conventions dressed as characters. They introduce friends to stories that may have premiered years earlier.
The companies behind those properties benefit enormously from that activity, but they don’t control every part of it.
That’s precisely what makes it valuable.
Enduring loyalty is difficult to manufacture through incentives alone. It grows when people receive enough value, identity, connection, or enjoyment that they voluntarily invest something of themselves in the experience.
Anime fans demonstrate what that can look like at an unusually high level.
The question for businesses isn’t how to turn customers into anime fans.
It’s whether they’re creating anything people would care enough about to share, participate in, and help carry forward.