Marketing ends where the product begins

Over the last couple days there have been at least a couple more stories written in the media about Hollywood and “The Twitter Effect,” specifically about the impact that Twitter feedback is having on movie marketing. This latest wave appears to have started in The Baltimore Sun and has then spread to AdAge, BNet, EConsultancy and even my old hang-out Open the Dialogue. The Hollywood Reporter’s RiskyBiz Blog even starts the ball rolling in the other direction by calling the (kind of) unexpected success of Inglorious Basterds this past weekend the first “Twitter success story,” since apparently good buzz kept the movie’s box-office strong day-to-day. Adweek picked up this idea as well, though Peter Kafka at AllThingsD tries his best to smack this down.

I’ve tried to put a nail in the coffin of this story time and time and time and time again but so far I seem to be either the only or one of very, very few who are putting any sort of critical thought into this issue. So I’m going to try and make this my last word on this issue since otherwise I’m just going to drive myself crazy.

There’s an example that I usually give Joseph Jaffe credit for putting out there. He said the marketing is only effective up to the exact moment a customer walks in the door. So if a bank runs ads that show smiling, friendly tellers who shake a woman’s hand and ruffles the hair of a smiling child it can be effective in bringing people in the door. But after that it’s the real product and customer experience – including to a large extent a formal customer service department – that is responsible for maintaining that individual as a customer and for their subsequent satisfaction levels.

So whether we’re talking about movies, banks, toothpaste or anything else, it’s not Twitter that is destroying you’re marketing: It’s the product itself and the consumer experience.

Word of mouth has always been the primary tool by which a movie lives or dies after its first weekend. The marketing campaign is responsible for making a movie a success Friday through Sunday but then it quickly dies out, with only a handful of ads and other materials that are put in place after that point. So it’s then word-of-mouth from the moviegoers that sustains or kills it. All Twitter – or Facebook or Flixster or blogs or anything else – does is speed that up. So, as I’ve stated before, studios don’t have a Twitter problem, they have a word-of-mouth problem because their movie isn’t meeting audience expectations.

Studios have always feared that reviews of their movies would dilute the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns they spent so much money on. That’s why reviews are often embargoed (unless the movie is screening at a film festival, in which case a review is essential to begin buzz around it) until opening day. The studios were counting on people already having decided to see a movie and not pay attention to whatever extent to the reviews that appeared on Friday. This is no different, except for the fact that many more people have blogs or Twitter accounts than have the job of professional movie critic at a newspaper. So it’s not like we’re dealing with a completely new paradigm, just an exponential increase in the reach of that paradigm.

Unlike other consumer products, movies aren’t long-lived items and they’re not something that can be exchanged for a bigger size or returned because they aren’t the correct item the shopper was looking for. So looking to online customer advocacy examples like those executed by Zappos and others on Twitter isn’t going to be a lot of help. Word of mouth can’t easily be turned around by offering to expedite a response and turn a problem around in 20 minutes instead of three days. (I maintain there are ways for studios to do this on status networks, but I’m not going to get into that again.)

Also unlike other consumer products, studios essentially outsource their customer service responsibilities. No, they don’t contract with a call-center in Bangladesh. But they do let a group of 16 year-olds handle it, the ones that work at the ticket counter and behind the concessions stand at theaters. If someone dislikes a movie they know that those kids and the other employees there can’t do anything about it. If they could, if there was some sort of even indirect way for those line employees to help out and help to rectify the situation, maybe we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

With out anything approximating a customer service solution in place the audience is taking to the one platform that allows them to vent their frustrations over a movie that didn’t live up to the marketing hype: Social media publishing. It’s only natural. Only with no customer service plan in place there’s almost no chance they’re negative commentary is going to be countered and those negative comments turned around as is the case with so many other industries.

That combines with the fact that Hollywood is expanding its marketing for movies that probably shouldn’t be trying to reach an audience that big. Carpet-bombing ad campaigns for movies with limited appeal – either because of subject matter or just style – inevitably brings in people who probably aren’t going to like that movie. The bigger the campaign the bigger that percentage of the audience. More people not inclined to like the movie means more people coming out of the theater feeling disappointed and therefore more people who are going to express that displeasure on status networks.

So let’s add all this up and see if it’s at all sustainable:

Studios put all their marketing eggs in one weekend-shaped basket, with little support after opening
There’s no discernable customer service model in the movie industry, even at the theater level
Campaigns are designed to appeal to as many people as possible and shaped to reach as many people as possible
The audience has access to a multitude of self-publishing tools to express their every whim, including their opinion of the movie they just saw

Probably not, right?

If smaller movies were being made that appealed to niche audiences and then campaigns were designed to reach those audiences effectively I don’t think we’d be seeing this story emerge. That would decrease the number of people coming out of the theater feeling duped and would actually have the opposite effect of making sure that the word-of mouth that did get spread would be among those communities and therefore have maximum impact.

Again, this is not a Twitter problem. All these “Twitter is destroying Hollywood’s marketing campaigns” stories are, at worst, bunk and at best don’t fully explore the tremendous opportunity Twitter and other status networks present to marketers. But they allow some stakeholders to feel better about themselves, that it’s not their fault for running a deceptive marketing campaign to bring in a big audience that weren’t inclined to like the movie and then bitched about it on a platform that amplified their word of mouth tremendously. It’s not their fault – it’s Twitter.

Your marketing ends where your product begins. It’s not Twitter, word-of-mouth or anything that’s making or breaking your movie: It’s your movie. If you’d like to get better audience reactions, make better product and sell it in a smarter way. That’s a basic marketing axiom that seems be be ignored in all this but probably shouldn’t.