Learning from Marvel success story — How to sustain customer interest in your product!
In a recent conversation at my office about re-energizing the “core”, I was reminded about an article I had read about Marvel’s blockbuster engine that has glued most of us to its movies for over a decade now (22 movies grossing $17Bn .. wow!), where other blockbusters failed to enthuse viewers with their sequels. I went back and read the article again.
Here I am summarizing my key takeaways from the article for benefit of all.
The Core Idea: Innovation with coherence — find a right balance between creating innovative films & retaining continuity to create a recognizable & coherent family
Now, how Marvel seems to have achieved it has been broken down into 4 key principles below.
1. ‘Select for experienced inexperience’
2. ‘Leverage a stable core’
3. ‘Keep challenging the formula’
4. ‘Cultivate customers’ curiosity’
Let’s elaborate a bit on these principles.
Select for experienced inexperience — Marvel hires top-notch talent (the experts) from different genres who have not attempted Marvel-like movies earlier. This gives the experts from other field enough degree of control to amalgamate their diversity into the Marvel movie’s screenplay and design. Example — Jon Favreau, having an Indie background, was chosen to direct the first Iron Man, along with the introduction of another expert from a different field, Robert Downey Jr., to play the iconic role; James Gunn, a horror-film director, was called in to direct the Guardian of the Galaxy. However, these and other such experiments are aggressive bets and seem to indicate that each movie has a different flavour; then how does Marvel ensure continuity and the kind of cohesion that it delivered with Avengers? Well, that brings us to the next principle.
Leverage a stable core — Even though many actors / directors enter and exit the Marvel Universe, Marvel delivers continuity by holding onto a small proportion of people from one movie to the next. This stability delivers and sustains the “core”. Iron-man is one such character appearing across the Marvel Universe. His appearance has always attracted audience to the upcoming movies even though he is just playing a cameo and provided the cohesion between differing storylines.
Keep Challenging the Formula — Well, when organizations find the winning formula, they normally stick to it till it starts withering away. Marvel, like Amazon’s founder, believes in the ‘Day-1’ culture. Notice the visual differences among the movies, their tone and their setting. Example — Iron Man 2, a movie filled with humour, was followed by Thor, a kind of serious and sad movie; the visual difference quite prominent in the Guardians of the Galaxy, set in space, compared to most others that are narrated on Earth, albeit in different settings. These variations in the setting and stories across movies have kept the audiences always guessing and thus, have built a fan base which expects something ‘different’ in each movie. In a nutshell, don’t be too predictable!
Cultivate Customer Curiosity — Marvel fans are glued to their seats till the credits end since Marvel has cleverly introduced some post-credit scenes hinting about their upcoming movie in the current installation. This trick starts the guessing game and creates a lot of buzz online for months to come. Apart from this, Marvel has also made it a point to engage with its consumers through forums and comics — inviting their suggestions and carefully reading through what’s being said on the social media about their movies.
Well, that’s all folks!
I would highly recommend you to read the complete article (link below). It’s so well drafted that I was totally engrossed in it during the entire journey of my red-eye flight.
