Marketing, or the lack thereof

I was on twitter recently, as I usually am, and someone posed a question that got my wheels spinning. The question was, and I am paraphrasing, Why did the Harry Potter movies translate to such huge amounts of book sales, when Comic movies make almost no difference to comic sales? I don't know if I actually have any definitive answers but I think I may have a few good ideas.

I blame it 99% on simple marketing. Whenever a new Harry Potter movie hit the big screen, everywhere you would go, you would see the Harry Potter posters, backpacks, journals, toys and most importantly BOOKS. The same thing would happen whenever they released the DVD's. It didn't matter if you were at a bookstore, a chain store such as WalMart or KMart, Starbucks or a gas station. The merchandise AND the books were available everywhere.

Now let's take as an example, the 1989 release of Batman. I use this example because it is the

template for every single Comic book movies' marketing campaign ever since. There was the Bat-Symbol everywhere. Fast Food had Batman giveaways, Prince had an epic(at the time) soundtrack that was all over MTV and the radio, backpacks, toys, EVERYTHING, except what was most important.....Comic Books. Yes, just like today, you could get it from you local comic store, but Batman #346 was not in front of your face at all times.....You had to go looking for it. Once the hype from the movie goes away, it is too late, unless people have gotten invested in the ongoing story, not just the stand alone story that was told on the big screen.

Another huge advantage that the Harry Potter Franchise has is that they (by they I really mean

J.K Rowlings) let the audience grow up with the characters. It started with young kids, just old enough to want to read and be impressed enough by the material to want to share it with their children, when that time came. The film company decided to let the films grow as well and every film was more mature so it would keep it's original fans. It never talked down to it's audience. And it never strayed far away from it's source material.

Comic movies on the other hand seems to hate its core audience. They don't want to invest in the future, to have characters that a child can relate to and obsess over for the rest of their lives.

Comic film marketers need to change the model that they are using. If more people were involved in the Serialized stories, they would be making more money on the merchandise, movies and the Comic Industry would be making more money. It is a Win-Win for everyone.

I do have ideas on merchandising that have been said a thousand times, by a thousand people but never seem to see the light of day. Like a free Avengers comic given away at the movie theatres when you are going to see the Avengers, or getting comics involved in the Fast Food Advertising or even stocking Major titles at places like WalMart where they are selling all of the Toys.

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