In his last post Mark Cuban gave us all a challenge. Find a new way to bring people to the movies. As a movie buff, I decided to take up the challenge and try to think of what would I do if I was a movie producer.
Anyway, here is my answer to Marc:
Hi Marc.
The root of the problem you are talking about is price vs value. What extra value can you give to people in order to convince them to go out and pay $12 to see a movie (or how much do you need to cut the price in order to do it).
Working against you (as I’m sure you now all of that):
· People today have much more entertainment option at home – Cable TV, Tivo, Internet (with videos), computer games…
· It’s relatively easy for a lot of people to find the movies in P2P networks and watch them at home for free (although illegal)
· Home Cinema systems and big screen TV/projectors prices are down. People can get great viewing experience straight in their living room
· Movie time from the big screen to DVD is getting shorter
So actually, the two reasons people should go out to the cinema for are: Watching the movie as soon as it comes out, and the actual experience of going out with friends.
And as you wrote in your post, another question is how can you reduce marketing budget and still make your value proposition known.
So first let’s tackle the first one – Watching the movie as soon as it comes out.
There will always be people who will go to a movie the first week it comes out (I was like that for quite some time). They are not your problem. The problem is the people who don’t care about watching the movie two months after its release.
Solution: Build a steps based pricing system for movies. A movie should cost $12 at the first week. But after a month, his price should be lower. (In the back end system you can also tie the price to demand. When demand start to go down, the system automatically reduce the price of the movie). You can also do a promotion where if a person goes to a movie in the first week, he gets a discount or a free ticket for an older movie.
Yes, it could mean that some people will wait a few weeks before going to the movie in order to get a reduced price, but it also mean that a lot more new people will go to see the movie. The backend pricing formula should find the right balance.
(You can also run this idea on seating places. Like in concerts. The best seats costs more than the ones in the first rows.)
And now let’s find ways to make the user experience better:
· Letting people not just choose their sit from the Internet but also to print the actual ticket, and save all the lines in the cinema (I know some sites supports this, but in many countries in Europe for example you still don’t get this service)
· Convince cinemas to reduce the price of some of the food and beverages, or at least use some kind of loyalty program (free popcorn on every x movies, etc).
· Print on the movie ticket a code users can enter when they back home in an Internet site in order to get some value. For example:
· Access to screen savers, desktop background, ringtones etc.
· Free download from iTunes of the movie theme song.
· On line chats with the movie actors, producers, etc
· A possibility to register to a lottery with some cool prizes
· Access to director comments about the movie, behind the scene footage and interviews (could be even scraps from the material already made for the DVD)
· Discount code for another movie
· A discount on the movie soundtrack (via partnership with iTunes, Rhapsody, etc)
The idea is to keep the user experience going even after coming back home. Of course this is a great way also to push other movie trailers and ads.
· Use the ticket to get real discounts and promotions for near the cinema businesses. For example when I left the movie Chocolate, It could have been great if I had a discount for the nearest chocolate store.
And what about reducing marketing budgets?
Well… there are a couple of ways you can harness the social networks of people and the Internet:
· Partner with dating sites – Going on a date to a movie is still popular with many people. Give two users who communicated between them in the dating site a coupon code for movie discount (the loss of money for the discount can be shared with the dating site)
· Measure the contribution of users to the spread of the movie and reward them accordingly – Users who will watch the trailers, write reviews, rate the movie, send a link to their friends, etc will get reward points. They will be able to convert those point into discounts or access to special Internet merchandize like movies ringtones.
More on that – Instead of you paying My Space enormous amount of money for putting the movie banner on site, use the users. Give users who put the banner in their home page extra points. Give iPods to a few of the people who put the movie trailer on their page or even theme their page with the movie theme (CSS created by you).
In summery – give users real incentives to do the promotion for you.
