How Warren Buffett turns fans into customers — and vice versa
Decades before subscription boxes or influencers shilling Tide and diet teas, Warren Buffett recognized a dynamic that nowadays powers everything from Patreon to TikTok to thousands of individual careers: fandom. If people love you enough, they will buy absolutely everything you’re selling. Your superfans will show up in droves to your convention to buy hats, T-shirts, candy, steaks, and everything else, all while loading up on your folksy, friendly-ole-neighborhood-billionaire wisdom.
It’s an accomplishment worth celebrating as Buffett turns 95 and prepares to step down by year-end after six decades at the helm of his vast and sprawling Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate.
Let’s look at how he did it.
Buffett began sending out annual shareholder letters in 1977, but they’ve always been more than simple financial updates. They also function as behind-the-scenes looks that let investors feel as if they were getting unprecedented access to his brain. Intentional or not, it’s a sophisticated approach to audience development and engagement.
“Our goal is to communicate with you in a manner that we would wish you to use if our positions were reversed — that is, if you were Berkshire’s CEO while I and my family were passive investors, trusting you with our savings,” Buffett wrote in his 2025 letter .
Appearing genuine may be the hardest thing of all, but one way to do it is to admit your failings. Buffett admits his missteps openly, using the words “mistake” or “error” multiple times in many if not most of the letters.
Modern creators spend years and fortunes trying to build the kind of authentic relationship with audiences that Buffett has established through his annual letters. They chase engagement and conversion metrics that Buffett achieved without even trying — or at least without ever appearing to try.
One of Buffett’s early experiments with fan economies came through See’s Candies, a California-based chocolate shop chain, which he acquired in 1972 for $25 million.
While sales volumes grew only 2% or 3% per year, in line with inflation, See’s was able to raise its effective price per pound well above inflation each year. The chocolate was good chocolate, but customers’ emotional connection mattered even more. Their candy purchase represented their buying into the larger See’s story of quality, tradition, and California nostalgia.
“Warren and I raised the prices of See’s Candies a little faster than others might have. There are actually people out there who don’t price everything as high as the market will easily stand. And once you figure that out, it’s like finding money in the street,” Charlie Munger later said of the acquisition. They’d discovered that emotional attachment can allow for premium pricing above an item’s objective value, now a hallmark of successful fan economies. They also observed that fans buying products year after year create recurring, subscription-like revenues.
And it’s paid off handsomely for them. Their modest investment of $32 million over the company’s lifetime eventually produced more than $1 billion in aggregate profits (and that just as of 2007).
By the 1980s, Buffett had scaled these lessons into what would become a template for modern fan cons. The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, dubbed “Woodstock for Capitalists,” draws tens of thousands to Omaha each May — a pilgrimage that generates massive ancillary revenue.
At the 2025 meeting alone, See’s Candy did $317,000 in sales against $283,000 the previous year, while Brooks shoes did $310,000 — an all-time record sales day. These aren’t accidental or incidental sales. They’re an outgrowth of extreme fan engagement.
Depending on how you look at it, attendees come for financial information and stay for community, or they come for the community and sit through the financial information. “We’ve come every year for the last thirteen years. This is a family affair,” said one Chicago father in an interview with Inc. Magazin e. “It’s like a rock concert. It’s the rock concert of capitalism. It’s like going on spring break, but when you went on spring break you didn’t have money.”
Buffett has long understood that the meeting itself isn’t the product — the whole experience is. He creates scarcity through limited seating, exclusivity through shareholder-only access, and community through the entire shared ritual. In 2010, a giant Dairy Queen spoon signed by Warren Buffett was auctioned to fans for $4,500 — which sounds like something only Taylor Swift or the NFL might otherwise pull off.
One of Buffett’s most sophisticated fan strategies has been his approach to portfolio expansion. Acquired companies that become Berkshire subsidiaries grow to be both revenue streams and cross-selling opportunities. Shareholders learn about portfolio holdings, and in the process they’re encouraged to become customers of GEICO, to shop for couches at Nebraska Furniture Mart, and to buy hot dogs and dip cones at Dairy Queen.
This cross-selling to superfans generates massive value. Berkshire shareholders actively promote the companies they part-own, a kind of affiliate and word-of-mouth advertising that money can’t buy. Turn your head and squint, and it’s a lot like a multi-level marketing scheme for Fortune 500 companies, only legitimate and above-board, on top of being massively profitable.
The contemporary influencer and creator playbook — building personal brands, making exclusive content for select subscribers, hosting expensive live events, cross-selling and upselling — only mirrors what Buffett has perfected over the decades. The scale is different, but the psychology and the tactics are identical. To borrow Buffett’s own preferred term, the sheer most powerful economic moat must be love itself.