The impact of reviews on sales
Finn at LightHeavyWeight is discussing the impact a positive or negative review can have on the sales of a video game title. While games are the focus of the research and his post, I think the data over there has value for looking at the movie world as well. There are a couple big takeaways from the research:
- Bad products don’t sell, and can’t be saved by marketing. This is fairly self-explanatory, but in case it’s not let me spell it out for you: You first need to concentrate on creating a good product. Not a product that looks good, not one that wows the execs in a boardroom, but a good product that is going to connect with the audience. Dave Winer says good software designers have the user in mind first and not themselves and I think the same needs to be true of people who create movies, games or any other media.
- The right marketing mix is essential to help good product find its audience, but a great campaign can’t save bad product. Great marketing is built on the back of a good product. Campaigns that seem to be stretching, trying too hard or otherwise seem strained are often indicative of bad product. And the Hollywood marketing machine is so finely tuned it can literally put lipstick on a pig. But the audience will figure out the marketers are bluffing eventually, which is why so many movies aren’t being screened for critics.
When we look at movies and wonder why box office receipts are down while marketing expenses are up I think we need to keep the two, fairly common sense points above in mind.
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My wife and I are avid movie-goers. At one point we wanted to see a movie in the theatre and of the movies then in the local theatres, there was not one movie that at least one of us had not seen.
Yet for the last 2 weeks we have not been to any movie. Either of us. This is largely because the current offerings are so caught up in either trying to be Award winners (Michael Clayton, Rendition, etc.) or just gory (Saw III) that they forget one thing…some of us like to be entertained by movies. Perhaps there is one out there that would have drawn us in with better marketing. Rendition and Clayton seem likely prospects for that…but the marketing was terrible. If I don’t feel like watching an attack on capitalism and/or the current government then I have no need to see either movie. As it happens, those might be sentitments I concur with…but the movies came across as straight agit-prop. Agit-prop typically lacks one thing…entertainment value. It is so busy making a statement it thinks people will go just because of that.
Oh, sure, I will see the social commentary movies (Crash comes pretty readily to mind) on occasion, but if I am going to spend 2 hours of my life and 40 bucks for that time period, I want to have some entertainment factored in.
This is something I think some of the “name” reviewers forget. I watched some of them pan the Simpsons Movie, for example…a movie that was funny enough I saw it twice in the theatre…while praising stuff so bad I almost walked out. Maybe I am not “elite” enough to “get” why I should be entertained by boredom and not by stuff that makes me laugh or keeps me entertained…
For example, I know the plot of The Game Plan is tired and hackneyed, the jokes are hardly original, and the ending is predictable and emotionally manipulative…at least it was entertaining. I cannot say the same for the (in previews) promising The Heartbreak Kid. Both claim to be comedies, one just forgot to throw in the laughs.
Sometimes the movies get so busy trying to be different they forget to be entertaining. I like a “different” movie all right…I have, throughout the last few years, picked off Coffee and Cigarettes, Just Kill Me to name a couple…Stardust was pretty offbeat and still highly entertaining…but for the most part, good marketing can’t get people like us to see an uninteresting movie and bad marketing (Bee Movie comes readily to mind) won’t stop us from seeing a potentially good movie.
At some point they need to make movies that, whether they have a message they want to get across a la Chuck and Larry or just want to make a good story like Eastern Promises, they need to entertain first and foremost.
Until that happens the previews can be as good as they want or as bad as they want and “average” movie-goers like us (we see about 50 -60 movies per year in the theatre) will keep our attendance down. If they can entertain us 3 times, 4 times, 5 times a week, we would be there. But if the best they can do is 1 or 2 watchable movies a month…well, at least I see Beowulf and American Gangster on the horizon. I guess the marketing is luring me into that. Mostly because it makes the stories look entertaining.