How important is marketing to a films success or failure at the box office?

How important is marketing to a films success or failure at the box office?

Marketing is the way a studio can make the audience have a perception of the film before it has even been released, and build a ‘buzz’ around the film.
Marketing is used to identify, satisfy and then keep the customer. Customers are key to any business, so it is integral in Hollywood that a studio builds a strong relationship with its potential customers through marketing.

Marketing can come in many forms; posters, trailers, merchandising, endorsements, promotions/tie-ins, music videos, TV appearances, and – most popular recently – viral marketing. A good marketing campaign will include all of these in an effective way.

Avatar (2009) is a good example of successful marketing campaigns. FOX spent nearly as much on marketing ($223,000,000) as they did on the whole of production ($237,000,000). This figure alone shows how important studios view marketing. Audience expectations for a film are made through marketing; a studio will have to identify their target audience and the needs and wants of that audience. They will highlight their films star or genre, or in the case of Avatar, the films star producer.

FOX ensured that they covered every platform when it came to marketing Avatar. Coca Cola released film tie-in cans with the Avatar characters on them, raising awareness to the potential audience of the film and its characters. The official Avatar website had new competitions regularly, and it even crashed due to the amount of users it had. The website was unique in the features it had; it wasn’t just a website you would visit once; you would always want to go back for more. The interactive marketing FOX used was probably the most successful. The audience was involved in creating a backstory for the film using the Wiki page ‘Pandorapedia’, whilst every single social network in use was filled with Avatar accounts. As well as this, the simplest platform of marketing, the posters, were simplistic and consistent. The characters were clearly on display, whilst the colour blue was a recurring theme. The logo and tagline was the same on each poster, so everyone knew what the film was through the posters alone.

Many believe Avatar was successful primarily for its story. Avatar is essentially Pocahontas in space, what made it successful was the buzz created by marketing. The film was marketed as if it was the best thing to happen to film since colour. The films new cinematic experiences were heavily marketed, and everyone was certain the film would be huge. It was.

However, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum is Disney’s John Carter; a prime example of what will happen if a studio does not market their film appropriately.

John Carter is one of the biggest film failures in history, grossing only $257,219,949 after Disney spent $350,000,000 on making the film (including $100,000,000 on marketing). The small amount that was spent on marketing immediately suggests that the film wouldn’t be as obvious in the public consciousness as Avatar was, as Disney spent less than half of what FOX did on marketing.

Disney failed to take advantage of the several marketing opportunities in front of them. There are thousands of Disney stores around the world and several Disney theme parks; the expectation was that these would be full of posters and merchandising, but they weren’t. From experience, I remember being in Downtown Disney before John Carter’s release, and I didn’t see any merchandise or posters in a shop full of Disney films; from Toy Story to UP, yet there was nothing for the new, expensive John Carter.

As well as this, the two platforms Disney did use (posters and trailers) they used poorly. The posters were inconsistent, and if you lined four up next to each other, they look like they are for completely different films in different genres. The trailer was very vague and didn’t make you want to go and pay to see the film; something marketing must do to attract an audience. It instead left me confused, and wondering what the genre actually was. Maybe Disney shouldn’t have dropped ‘of Mars’ from the film title. Clearly, it left the majority of the world confused. Just 5 days after John Carter’s release, Disney made a statement to say that it was a huge Box Office flop. Even then, they didn’t try to save face and recoup some money.

Nevertheless, the film was a failure. Poor story may have had some impact, but we all know that Avatar wasn’t narratively amazing. Marketing had a huge effect on the success of both films. It is easy to conclude that marketing is hugely important in whether a film with be a success or failure at the box office. A film’s marketing campaign is what they are relying on to bring in the audience to make money. If a studio doesn’t use the correct marketing campaigns, their film won’t be in the public consciousness, so the target audience will possibly have a negative perception of the film, or no perception at all. And if there is no buzz surrounding the film, it is likely to be a failure.