I upset one of the world's biggest fandoms – and speaking to my critics taught me much more than just "don't mess with the ARMY"

A few weeks ago I published an article on this site titled What the insanity around BTS can teach us about branding in 2026. It got a reaction. Thousands of words of pushback on Reddit, in our own comments and in email to me, ranging from sharp and incisive to, let's say, less measured.

Some of this was fair. Some wasn't. Some of it taught me things I hadn't known. And much of it has lessons for everyone working in branding today. But first, some context – because if you're not already a BTS fan, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about.

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Why this matters

BTS are a seven-member group who debuted in Korea in 2013. By any reasonable measure, they're one of the biggest acts in the world: stadium tours, record-breaking chart positions, a UN speech, a White House visit, and a fanbase (called ARMY, a name the band gave them) that spans every continent, gender and every age group, from teenagers in Manila to women in their seventies in the American Midwest.

They're a K-pop act, and that label carries baggage worth addressing head-on. K-pop emerged from Korea in the 1990s and went global in the 2010s. It has a reputation, not entirely unearned, for being highly manufactured. Agencies sign young trainees, put them through years of intensive coaching, and release them into tightly choreographed acts with polished visuals and carefully managed public images.

Some Westerners see this as a negative, and use it to portray the artists and their fans as somehow "lesser". Personally, I've never held that view. After all, the Beatles were a media-sculpted boy band. The Sex Pistols were as manufactured as any K-pop group. That doesn't stop either of them being culturally significant.

When I wrote my article, though, what I forgot was how many people do dismiss K-pop, and how upsetting that is for fans who've heard it all before. My piece, without my fully realising it, played into that narrative... and for that I apologise.

What I got wrong

For starters, the word "insanity" in my headline was a poor choice. I meant "crazily popular", but I can see why it landed differently. Readers pointed out that nobody writes that way about sports fans who spend large sums on season tickets and away fixtures. That's fair, and I should have spotted it.

In retrospect, I also overstated the importance of the band's more elaborate marketing constructs. To take one example, I talked about the Bangtan Universe (a parallel fictional storyline woven through BTS media) but should have made clear that its contribution to their popularity is, at best, marginal.

Many fans said they'd never really engaged with the Bangtan Universe. Lily Freeman, a senior account director at W Communications and a fan since 2020, had to Google the term when I raised it. "I think it definitely adds another level to their music launches because fans love to look for deeper meaning in things," she told me. "But I wouldn't say it's hugely helped their popularity overall."

The bigger problem, though, was that I fell into a trap that's common when writing about any passionate fandom. I gave the impression, albeit unwittingly, that the BTS–ARMY relationship was something engineered in a boardroom… when actually the reality is considerably more interesting.

What I missed

Here's the story I'd missed. When BTS debuted in 2013, they were on a small, near-bankrupt label with none of the promotional muscle available to bigger acts. Locked out of the TV shows that dominated Korean pop, they turned to social media out of necessity (livestreams, candid posts, direct interaction with fans), at a point when almost nobody else in the industry was doing it.

That created something genuinely two-way. The corporation later formalised and monetised it. But it didn't invent it.

Alison, a fan in her forties who wanted her surname kept private, put it well. She told me about how she was drawn in to BTS during a period of personal difficulty, partly because of the band's candour. "Member Suga released a mixtape in 2016 in which he raps about his struggles with depression and opposition from his family about his choice to pursue music," she explained. "This was a breath of fresh air in the K-pop world at the time, as idols were expected to have this 'perfect', otherworldly image."

Paige Hartley, who works in PR in London and has tickets to this year's tour, pointed to the practical community that fandom had built around her. "Listening to K-pop has opened the door to discovering a new culture," she enthused. "I now listen to other Korean artists, love Korean food and even visited South Korea with my best friend who introduced me to BTS. When I started a new job a few years back, I became friends with other people in the office who also loved K-pop and they've gone on to become some of my closest friends."

My article talked about "parasocial relationships", which are a real thing in every fandom. But I failed to talk about many actual, human relationships formed through a shared interest such as BTS. My original framing missed that entirely.

The branding lesson I should have led with

So what can we learn from all this? Here's what the whole episode clarified for me, and it's a lesson that applies well beyond BTS or K-pop.

Firstly, there's a meaningful difference between a brand that engineers loyalty and a brand that earns it. The most interesting thing about BTS is that it started as the latter and became the former. Yes, these two layers are now impossible to fully separate. But that's not a criticism: it's true of most durable cultural brands: the Beatles, Nike, Apple. The myth and the machinery are intertwined, and trying to pull them apart misses the point.

Some on Reddit felt I'd implied parasocial relationships were a BTS-specific thing invented by their parent company Hybe. But as they correctly pointed out, Hollywood studios and pop labels have been cultivating them for well over a century. What's distinctive about BTS isn't that fans feel close to them; it's the strength and reciprocal nature of that closeness. Indeed, it's proved so difficult to engineer deliberately, even Hybe can't reliably replicate it across other acts.

And that, I realise, is the real lesson here. The brands we find most compelling in 2026 aren't the ones with the most sophisticated loyalty mechanics. They're the ones that started with something genuine (candour, necessity, a real point of view) and then scaled it.

As Paige put it: "Creating community with and for the fans is something K-pop labels do really well, and you can see other Western labels have caught onto that." But catching on to a technique is not the same as catching on to what made it work in the first place.

I got some things right in my first piece. I should have got more of them right. Thanks to the ARMY members who took the time to correct me; and, in doing so, shared some lessons in branding rather better than I had.

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