Who Is Collecting YOUR Product?

I was having a discussion with a friend who had lost a compact disc, and he was lamenting the fact that the disc he lost was "a collector's item". He had the songs stored on his iTunes, and at this point in the mass shift to digital media, the idea of someone still actively collecting compact discs struck me as fairly laughable. So I went online to check out the trends, and serendipitously enough, found this similarly laugh-worthy story from the satirical newspaper The Onion entitled: Everything In Entire World Now Collectible. Here are a few quick quotes:

"This is awesome," said Marvin Humboldt, 46, lovingly holding his grocery purchases. "I've finally got the full run of the Wonder Bread 'NFL Legends' bags. And this gallon of 2% milk has a red dot on the cap, which means it's a first-run factory proof." (...)

"Do you have any idea how many Beanie Babies are out there?" asked Barbara Mason, editor of Beanie Baby Illustrated. "Let's put it this way: There are approximately twice as many Scoop The Pelican Beanie Babies on the planet Earth than there are actual pelicans." (...)

Manufacturers have caught on to the trend, releasing mundane products such as cigarettes, beer, and snack chips in special collector's "platinum" editions at marked-up prices.

Humor aside, every company has people who are passionate about its product -- who are those people, for your firm? What are you doing to reach out and engage them, to find out what inspires them about your product? And what elements of that inspiration can be communicated to others?