User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Announcing Fandom's (Virtual) Community Connect 2021/@comment-1824169-20210127035526


 * "At last year’s Community Connect, we talked about how there are a number of elements important to a brand (like a vision, mission, and brand story) that haven’t been fully defined for Fandom over the years. This year, you’ll hear from our Marketing team on the work they've done to define the brand and how we live, breathe, and communicate the brand across all audiences."

I think this is really important to do simply because the branding comes off as vague at the moment. I understand that the term "Fandom" is probably good for SEO because of how broad of a term it is, but at the same time, its broadness makes it feel difficult to define as a brand, especially since the term was in use in different communities long before the switch in branding. Most of my peers still refer to the website as "Wikia" even this far into the rebranding, and truthfully, I usually refer to it as "Wikia" as well. It's much less confusing to say "I use Wikia" as opposed to "I use Fandom"; the first response most people are going to have is "well, which fandom?".

It's also been hard to pin down what exactly the brand is going for, in my opinion at least. Is this a website for wikis? Articles? Discussions? I feel like it was much easier to get a clear image of the brand when it was focused around the wikis; I understand the need to branch off, but the execution of it has made things feel very fractured. As they are now, wikis, articles, and discussions feel like three very different brands with a very tenuous connection between them. To be more specific, I think the wikis are what most people know you for, the articles feel like very standard media blogs, and the discussions feel like a bit of a haphazard mix between Twitter feeds and old-school text forum layouts. None of it feels very cohesive.

I can't say I have any miracle solutions for the problem, but my best suggestion would be making articles and discussions more "customizable"; Wikia/Fandom has always thrived on branding itself as being community-driven, but the corporate feel of Articles and stiff-necked nature of Discussions seem to run counter to that. There needs to be a concrete decision made on whether Fandom wants to reinforce its branding of being community-driven or shift gears towards something else entirely. What's been done so far feels like a series of half-measures meandering towards an ill-defined goal, making a number of users feel frustrated and unheard by the platform.