With total ticket sales expected to easily exceed $1 Billion worldwide, Marvel Studios, in their promotion of ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ is redefining the way marketing is done in the film industry.
New York, NY - Long gone are the days when selling your film requires endlessly promoting and releasing enough preview content to spoil nearly half the movie’s plot. That’s how it would seem if you were walking the halls of Marvel Studios, at least. In a day and age where movie trailers are practically a business in and of themselves, the film giant, in their promotion of their upcoming 22nd movie release, have done something most other film studios would consider career suicide; they’re playing coy.
Rather than push trailer after even more revealing trailer out for public consumption, the Disney-owned juggernaut has instead opted to show as little of their film as they can possibly get away with — a move geared toward making sure audiences will genuinely be surprised when they see the final cut.
The curious thing about all this is that trying this hard to conceal details about a release often automatically leads experts to assume that it’s just a bad film that’s being snuck into theaters for a quick cash-grab. In the case of Marvel Studios, however, absolutely no critic or industry expert is even hinting at that.
When asked about why, Andrew Kaplan, marketing strategist and author of “It Doesn’t Matter What You’re Selling,” provided a very simple reason.
“They’re banking on all the goodwill they’ve generated over the past 10 years - a full decade of consistently producing quality entertainment for their target customer. See, they understand their audience well, and every movie they make always finds a way of pleasing those viewers and guaranteeing each of them will be back for more.”
Kaplan went on to compare Marvel’s unprecedented run with Apple’s iPhone in its earlier years, or the popularity Tesla seems to be enjoying today as well.
“The best person to sell to is a customer who’s already satisfied. And the best way to guarantee they buy from you is by proving you’re the best for so long that it practically becomes an automatic assumption that you’re going to deliver. Bottom line, Marvel doesn’t have to ask anyone to buy tickets because the studio has already demonstrated that fans are going to get their money’s worth. I can think of no better way to guarantee success.”
While Marvel Studios has had two film releases since (July’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp” and this month’s “Captain Marvel”), “Avengers: Endgame” is a direct follow up to last year’s “Avengers: Infinity War” which grossed over $2 billion worldwide and ended in a universe-shattering cliffhanger that left audiences begging to find out what’s going to happen next.
Based on that move alone, it’s clear Marvel’s had a well-mapped sales strategy for quite some time now.
