Introduction and background
The twilight saga is a series of films based on romance and fantasy produced by summit entertainment. The series is based on some very successful series of novels by an American, Stephenie Meyer. The twilight series of novels has undergone various dramatic twists and turns over time by first being rejected by a number of agents prior to publishing. On production in paperback, it went ahead to be in the bestsellers top list before becoming the worlds number one.
The series of movies has been able to gross well over $1.7 billion all over the world. At the moment it consists of three motion pictures. The first release, Twilight came out in November 2008 followed by The Twilight Saga: New Moon in November 2009. The second release broke the records at box office being the biggest opening day in history by clocking a gross of $72.7 million. The third release was The Twilight Saga: New Eclipse. It was released on 30th June 2010 being the first in its series to be released in IMAX.
The production of the movies had started sometimes in 2004 by paramount pictures though there was a bit of difference in the content and the one in the novel. This led summit pictures to acquire the rights of production where it grossed an opening day of $35.7million through Twilight.
Following this, they instantaneously announced the production of New Moon having obtained the rights to have the production line of the novels earlier in the same month. There is a projection for the release of Breaking Dawn in two parts which will begin by November 2011 and the last part in November 2012.
Major products
The Twilight series of movies has been produced alongside other movies by summit entertainment LLC. Twilight was the first success story for summit after making a worldwide gross of $408,773,703. Another movie by the same company is “knowing” which made a worldwide gross of $182,492,056. Some other movies are the hurt locker, next day air, astro boy, sorority row and the hit new moon which bagged $295,114,155 in the US and a total of $709,711,008 in total all over the world.
Twilight is the first movie in the series. It is based on love between two diverse creatures, that is a vampire and a human being and the various issues which ensue fro that relattionship. This movie opened with a gross of $35.7 million and up to now has made US$ 384.9 million. The DVD for the movie has additionally sold $181 million.
The second release in 2009 was “The Twilight Saga: The New Moon”. This movie set various records in the theatres after its release. Some of the records were broken by the Eclipse which is its sequel as both clocked the highest opening day in the domestic history of the United States (Fradkin, 2009).
A tabulated show of the reception of all the films is as below.
The above tabulation is a fair indication of how good the movie has bee doing over time by surpassing most of its competitors.
The marketing environment
Looking at the above income generation tabulation, the producers must have had a critical analysis of the local marketing environment for the series of films.
The novel by Meyer attracted the young adults who had a loving for romantic based horror stories. The first impact to be considered is how the novel itself faired amongst the domestic market. Meyer’s book was in the first place a bestseller so it was a good point to start from in the production of a movie by the same name. On the other hand, domestically, the Americans have a very big interest when it came to the film industry and so the better their advertisement for the movie, the better and greater the audience it was to receive.
When the company came out with the Twilight, it immediately announced that it had booked the other series of novels for movie releases thus keeping the client base in a waiting mode. This was a big blow to competitors and an out right reason to have a better consequent production. In the marketing environment area, some of the deciding factors which can affect business are the competitors.
Competitors
Among the greatest competitors for this series of films are the Vampire Diaries and True Blood. Vampire Diaries is also a horror fantasy TV series which has been developed by Kevin Williamson. It has been developed on the basis of a novel by L.J Smith also know as the Vampire Diaries.
The story line for this series is almost as in the Twilight series where both of them are based on a human being falling in love with a monster. The show attracted also a very big audience during its first premiere in 2010, opening room for the second season. Its first season attracted a final tally of 3.6 million viewers whilst its second season which premiered this year is still running though with a less number of initial premier viewers.
The other competitor is True blood which is also a national TV series and was produced by Alan Ball. Alan Ball also produced six feet under. This series is based on a series of novels known as “the southern vampire mysteries” by Charlaine Harris. The story line for the series is also about the coexistence of human beings and monsters as in the previous two listings.
Marketing strategies and comparisons
A lot of advertising has been done on the yet to be released films in this series of films. Some brands had opted to include the Twilight in their meals as a method of marketing but the real interest falls in the key players. The twilight marketing group was involved with the re-branding of a book published years ago.
On this book, the cover is almost identical to the twilight series and has been depicted as the favorite book for Bella and Edward. The strength of this strategy is so obvious and strong in that there is a general presumption of who the two characters, Bella and Edward are. In this case, the book was supposed to market as a favorite for the two main characters in the movie thus keeping people aware and anticipating for the release of the next movie.
The biggest importance that has been posed by the twilight to its client base is the way it has been able to make money in the past. By the first film being able to garner over $383 million at the box office and over $157 million in sales of DVD, it then means that it is one of the key players in the market (Martin, 2008). The film’s soundtrack was the number one in the charts in just a very short time. The increased number of books sold by Meyer got him to the Forbes list thus making the enterprise so lucrative (Kotler and Armstrong, 2010).
One of the other key strategies in marketing is concentrating in more than a single franchise. The young have a gross liking for the horror stories that there got to be an emergence of competitors like the Vampire Diaries and True Blood.
The advantage of the Twilight is that both the rest of the series are just TV shows thus not being able to attract as many people as a movie and also due to the fact that they lay their story line with the Twilight as the backbone. Externally, more companies are marketing their products in a bid to increase sales by incorporating vampires in their product advertisements (Fradkin, 2009).
Also, Twilight is stimulating the reputation of its brand partners. It comes out that it can heighten even the most unanticipated marques. We can take Volvo as a sample. The car brand does not play a big role in the youth in the realm of automobile marques. But since Edward drives a Volvo in the film, all of a sudden Volvos are among the best.
One fan explained that: “For most fans, making Edward’s Volvo anything but silver would be like deciding that the Bat-mobile should be purple” (Fradkin, 2009). This shows clearly and vividly the height of strategic marketing that has impacted the film.
At the same time, even vampire related guerilla marketing has proved to work. During the recent past, a fan from northern England saw one push that had made use of this particular brand as a way of encouraging members of the public to take part in blood donation. Leaflets calling for people to donate their blood and that were cheekily adorned represented the art work of the New Moon.
Twilight effect has overwhelmingly spread many people and of all age groups such that the various companies as well as products that are linked to it are not just those who focus on teens for their markets also to older people. Mattel’s Barbie-Twilight statistics are clearly aimed at far-flung younger viewers; while the Volvos are apt to be purchased by the older users.
Twilight brings out one way through which digital technology can be exploited. Apart from its iPhone application and the “Habbo” virtual-world, Twilight has approximately over 4 million fans on “Facebook”. It also boasts of a near-constant treatment by fan sites and bloggers. This has been through the constant feeding of intended news to the fans thus making the marketing involvement of the management so good.
To the competitors these strategies have shown that it does not necessarily mean that escapism has been a course due to the bad market but ingenious thinking has made this film go a long way. There has been an active integration of the 4 Ps in an excellent manner in that they offer the right product and service to the consumers.
The movie industry being incorporated with romance and horror proved the best to the audience. The place to sell the product was excellent in that the American populaces were all ardent fans of films and so the production if advertised well would fetch a lot. Promotion was still excellent starting with the example of the Burger promotion.
If the competitors are to get to be as successful as it was proved by this film, then they would have to identify themselves with the key elements of marketing. Looking at true brand, they got to viral marketing. They set up a group of websites and also ailed various addresses to a variety of known blog writers.
They incorporated myspace account with two movie clips of what to expect thus getting the right people in the right place. In addition, they included several commercials on websites such as facebook and HBO and also placed vampires in many ads in a bid to promoter it. Some beverage vending machines also had ads promoting “trublood” which is a beverage in the series.
Still on marketing they issued many DVDs of the first season to those who attended Midnight Madness. This was among other kinds of activities that were used to market trueblood. With all this in place the series had gone ahead to incorporate the promotional element into the market. The branding of the name trueblood in many products and keeping the population armed with the essence of vampires’ plays a very big part (Menon et al. 1999).
SWOT Analysis
Strengths
- Reputation from the previous success of the initial films.
- Strong brand has been created by the initial films.
- Operation on more than one franchise.
Weaknesses
- Inability to deal with negative consequences due to high expectations.
Opportunities
- Well established itself in the market niche, which has proven to be well defined.
Threats
- Dependent on a series of novels which has a limit (Hill and Westbrook, 1997).
References
Fradkin, L. (2009). The Vampire Diaries’ Ian Somerhalder on Being a Vampire and Returning to Los“. New York Magazine. Web.
Hill, T. & Westbrook, R. (1997). “SWOT Analysis: It’s Time for a Product Recall”. Long Range Planning 30 (1): 46–52.
Kotler, P. & Armstrong, G. (2010). Principles of marketing (13th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Martin, D. (2008). Twilight’ sequel ‘New Moon’ gets the greenlight from Summit. Los Angeles Times. Web.
Menon, A. et al. (1999). “Antecedents and Consequences of Marketing Strategy Making”. Journal of Marketing (American Marketing Association) 63 (2):18–40.