Iron Man In India; What Indian Advertisers Can Learn From The MCU
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has been going strong for over a decade and has redefined the movie industry. A studio only producing comic book movies — which have been traditionally cast as passion rather than profitable projects — has dominated the box office.
In fact, Disney bought Marvel Studios as early as 2009, and have since made $18 billion as of June 2019, at just the box office!
The only reason they were able to do so successfully was because they decided to build a “universe” instead of pouring the money into separate movies to catch trends. They built a brand, and each movie worked towards reinforcing the brand image.
As the brand of the MCU and the brand of each superhero was already established, Avengers Infinity War and Avengers Endgame were both successes despite having multiple characters and multiple plot lines spread out over two movies.
How Marvel built a multi-decade film series without ever going stale, and cashing in on large events once every couple of years, is the perfect marketing case study. So, what can we Indian marketers learn from them?
Stick To The Basics
Marvel Studios was directly inspired by the Spiderman and X-Men movie series of the first decade of the 21st century. However, the true proof of its potential success came from a very similar venture more than half a century prior.
In 1963, Stan Lee and his collaborators put out the comic book “The Avengers.” And so, the Marvel Universe was born. In 2007, Kevin Feige became one of the youngest studio heads in the world as the 33-year old was tasked with bringing the MCU to life.
Initially, the goal was to get to the first Avengers movie. However, the unprecedented success of the MCU convinced them to call that the end of Phase 1 . The MCU has now crossed 4 phases.
How did they do it? Planning, diligence, and strong, consistent brand positioning.
Over the last 13 years, Feige has carefully put together the Marvel brand in an effort to recreate the success of the 1960s comic universe.
Every movie is vetted by 6-person executive team to make sure it stays on brand.
Every director is vetted and made to understand his creation is to fit within the universe and not stand alone.
Every 18 months, the senior management at Marvel Studios gets together to review the process and make sure that all the past and upcoming movies are following the right brand positioning.
Planning, diligence and strong, consistent brand positioning.
Short Term Sacrifices For Long Term Gain
The first Iron Man movie is considered a classic of the genre, and is one of the most popular MCU movies of all time. In contrast, Iron Man 3 was considered a relative critical flop.
Iron Man made $585.3 million at the box office. Iron Man 3 made $1.2 billion at the box office. The former had to build the MCU brand. The latter benefited from an established brand.
Would Marvel have made more money by not producing Iron Man 3? Probably? Do Marvel Studios and Feige know that? Absolutely. However, the movie was needed for two reasons. Build continuity in Iron Man’s story, and build continuity between the films.
In other words, they probably knew they didn’t have a blockbuster on their hands (though a billion dollars in box office money is not bad for a flop!). However, they moved to maintain brand positioning, and to keep delivering fresh brand value to the customer.
Sometimes short-term marketing effectiveness needs to take a step back from long-term marketing continuity. Especially since building a good ad, or a viral ad, has a lot to do with luck. If you can’t guarantee rare brilliance, you must focus on being consistently above average.
Iron Man 3 will be forgotten to time — or, it would have been if it didn’t belong to the MCU. If you build a strong enough brand position, even your average marketing attempts provide an above average return on investment.
Replicating The Success On The Small Screen
Marvel Studios were luckier than most; they had an incredible amount of customer-vetted content to use and translate into a series of successful films. The rest of us still need to take that extra step of conducting user research and determining a brand position.
However, once your brand value is determined, advertising gets easier. It is not about consistent quality. It is just about consistent relevancy. Every single advert that is released must reinforce your brand value to the customer.
Everything Nike does reinforces that they are they are the brand to inspire you to Just Do It. Everything Brooke Bond does reinforces that they are a socially progressive and feel-good brand, much like the feeling they want you to have when drinking a good cup of tea.
Much like content marketing, branded marketing takes time and effort. There will be days when you question the whole venture. There will be days when you see lower returns, and there will be adverts that don’t push your brand position in the right direction.
But, if you stick with it and you are obsessed with providing value to your customers, you will start seeing higher and higher average returns on your investment.
Are you unsure of how to build a long-term marketing strategy focussed on advertising your brand value to your customers? Please reach out to me at tarutr@getlokalapp.com, or at malhotratarutr@gmail.com.
If you are uncomfortable talking to me over email, you can DM me on my LinkedIn page or my Twitter profile. I would love to talk to each and every one of you personally!
If you liked this article, please do consider subscribing to my weekly email newsletter. It provides a brief and links for all three weekly articles, as well as some interesting little tidbits for subscribers only!
