This week’s Power Windows post is a little different. Rather than provide insight around a specific topic, I’ll take a fresh approach to laying out a project timeline for marketing a movie.
Going from concept to butts-in-seats is a multi-year process with several very different stakeholders to satisfy. And, to no one’s real surprise each group goes through different emotional states over time. The following diagram illustrates what each stakeholder might go through for an animated holiday movie aimed at children. While the Industry starts off-skeptical, after all they’ve seen lots of ideas, the target audience is curious and interested in discovery. The challenge is to satisfy the skeptics without giving too much away. In the day of print, this was fairly easy. In the age of the Internet it isn’t.
Marketing plans need to address the sometimes conflicting emotional needs of different audiences at the same point in time. This is a strategic activity as much as anything else.
