Does Marketing By Numbers Mean Reversion To The Bland?

The entertainment industry creates short-lived products that often generate intense customer passions. As such, it's a terrific source of case-studies for marketers. Forget FMCG, this is the world of VFMCG.

Unfortunately,  it intermittantly dabbles with  FMCG practices such as reducing its output to product rather than "art".  Some years ago, this took the form of hiring traditional consumer goods' marketers  who, while they added some much-needed rigour,  neither understood the market nor the output.

It's arguable that this is re-emerging in the movie business. This article from The Atlantic suggests that

Studios were better at making great movies when they were worse at figuring out what we wanted to see.

The problem, of course,  is that marketing by numbers can all too easily focus on the consistency of the product rather than the excellence of the user experience. So, while it's valid to point out that


it turns out there are a lot of people who are fine with fine .
it's also clear that a lot of people are not. If they were, they'd be buying more than four tickets a year and the US box-office might not be stagnating. It's a fascinating article for anyone interested in movies, but the parallels with all industries should not be lost on any marketer/differentiator.