Do I really need to watch a billion hours of content to understand?
At least it isn’t normal homework!
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SOURCES
https://www.ign.com/articles/marvel-confirms-your-list-of-avengers-doomsday-homework-featuring-15-movies-and-tv-series-and-a-couple-of-deep-cuts
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2746936 https://b-plannow.com/en/fcb-grid-understanding-consumer-behavior-for-effective-communication-strategies/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Donovan-2/publication/232573942_A_better_advertising_planning_grid/links/02e7e53814363126b8000000/A-Better-Advertising-Planning-Grid.pdf
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TRANSCRIPT:
I’ve mentioned this a time or two, but I grew up reading comic books, mostly Spider-Man and the X-Men, and so I’m at least a little interested in seeing whatever Disney and Marvel Studios are going to try to pull off with their movie Avengers: Doomsday, which comes out on December 18 of this year.
But like a lot of people, I was a little surprised last week when Disney+ released a list of 15 movies and shows you need to watch to be able to understand the plot of this upcoming film.
Now, to be fair, this is Disney+, the streaming service that’s trying to get you to watch more of its content so you’ll keep your subscription, and the hyperbolic news pieces that have been going around talking about how Marvel is assigning us a bunch of homework is, well, made up controversy intended to stir the pot.
But let me read this list.
X-Men – The one where they’re all wearing black leather suits. It came out when I was in college.
X2 – The sequel. I don’t even think I’d met my wife when this one came out, and we’ve been married over 20 years.
Captain America: The First Avenger – I’m not sure why you’d need to watch this one again. I think we all know who Captain America is by now. Surprisingly, we don’t need to watch any of the Iron Man, Thor, Hulk or Black Widow movies. They’re in the Avengers too!
The Avengers, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame – So no Avengers: Age of Ultron, huh? I guess this affirms what I’ve always said – that movie never needed to be made.
Loki – This is a TV series, and a decent one, really.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings – I really don’t care about Shang-Chi.
Spider-Man: No Way Home – Not the most recent Spider-Man movie, or even one of the really goods ones. This is the one with the multiverse shenanigans. It was… fine, I guess?
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – You know, as much as I love the first Black Panther movie, I never even thought about this one. Maybe I should watch it sometime.
Captain America: Brave New World – This was the Captain America movie that nobody liked. Hard pass.
Deadpool & Wolverine – I enjoyed this one, but why do I need to watch it, exactly?
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – I’m really tired of all the multiverse stuff. Isn’t everyone?
Thunderbolts – This one has an asterisk at the end of the title because, spoiler alert, at the very end of the movie, you find out they’re the NEW Avengers. I can’t remember a single one of these characters by name.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps – This was like, what our… fourth attempt at making a movie franchise out of the Fantastic Four? I get the nostalgia for the older Marvel fans, but by the time I was reading comics, the Fantastic Four was about as dated as westerns, Woodstock and disco.
There was a reason the cool geeks were reading X-Men and Spider-Man in the 1990s, and the really cool ones weren’t reading Marvel at all.
OK, so watching 14 movies and a show so you can grasp the intricacies of a 3-hour movie sounds like a lot.
I’m going to guess the diehard fans have already seen them anyways.
But for those of us who want to, you know, just go watch a movie, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is out, and it’s made $2 billion already. It’s not only a reboot of that whole can of worms, but it requires no homework and has Tom Holland and Zendaya in it besides.
Oh, and add it to the list, by the way, because it does feature one of the original X-Men in a surprise role.
I guess the question I want to address today is whether most moviegoers will even bother with all this preparation. And my feeling is, probably not, because we have a concept in marketing that already describes this phenomenon in detail.
It’s called Involvement, and let’s see how it impacts how much – or how little – homework we’re willing to do outside of school.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Involvement is a term we use in marketing strategy to talk about how much, or how little, research people are willing to about a product or service category before purchasing.
I’ve looked into this to try to figure out where the term first came from in marketing, and it appears to have first been popularized by an annotated speech appearing as an article in 1965 called “The Impact of Television Advertising: Learning Without Involvement” by Herbert E. Krugman in The Public Opinion Quarterly.
I don’t get the sense that Krugman invented the term; he cites earlier research from the 1950s that uses the term “ego-involvement,” but his speech is trying to explain why people do and don’t pay attention to certain television ads and why there’s this sort of U-shaped level of interest in them.
He discusses in the piece how when information is novel, it’s trivia, filling in a gap in knowledge, but when you bombard people with it, they don’t necessarily become more persuadable or interested in it.
It’s only when they want to be interested, perhaps because they’re considering the category the ad touches upon, that they begin paying closer attention.
OK, so that’s all very interesting, but the real credit for making this a more common marketing concept may go to Richard Vaughan, who in 1980 published a 2×2 known as the FCB Grid.
It breaks our informational needs down into thinking and feeling on the X-axis and low involvement and high involvement on the y-axis, with involvement in this case meaning how much effort and research we put into learning something.
If we’re looking to learn something in an informative manner, we take a thinking approach with a high level of involvement. This is a rational method.
But if we’re just trying to get the gist in a habitual manner, we can try the low-involvement approach where we think as we repeat a task. This is also rational.
If we want to flip over to the emotional side of things, high involvement and high feeling leads us to what we call an affective manner of acquiring information – figuring out what we like – and low involvement with feelings lads us to what we call a satisfaction manner – figuring out what makes us happy in the moment.
So, going to see a movie just in general is going to fall under all four of these things, really, depending on the person. Someone who reads reviews before they commit to buying a ticket is going to be in the high involvement category, and what they get out of it is really going to depend on the kind of stimulation they expect.
Someone who just likes to go to the movies or who doesn’t care about the details before going in is going to wind up in the low involvement half of the quadrant.
So, as you can probably already see, the FCB grid’s main problem is that it doesn’t have a lot of empirical evidence to support it.
One group of advertising researchers and textbook authors, John Rossiter and Larry Percy, tried to improve it in 1987 with a paper that suggested tossing out thinking and feeling and instead having consumers weigh things informationally or transformationally depending upon their levels of involvement.
But they also added an important presupposition – consumers had to be aware of a brand to have an attitude towards it.
So if someone has low need for research or conviction and just needs to select a brand to solve a problem, like figuring out which aspirin to buy, they’re going to rely on an informational framework to eliminate choices.
But if they have low involvement and need to get a positive benefit in some way, like purchasing a treat, they’d rely on a transformational approach.
Likewise, in the realm of high involvement, if they’re solving a problem with a new home appliance or renovation – it’s informational because they’re solving a problem.
Buying a new car or going on vacation – transformational because they’re doing something positive.
In this framework, we can at least understand that going to see a movie is going to fall under that positive, or transformational, side of the grid.
But again, there are people who just go and see movies and there are people who study up on them before they go see them. So where would Avengers: Doomsday fit in? It really depends on the person.
Fortunately, the Rossiter-Percy matrix does offer some tactics for a transformational need.
People want sensory gratification – going from dull to elated
They want intellectual stimulation- going from bored to excited
And they want social approval – going from apprehensive to included
Aha! This is where we can see if Disney+’s Avengers: Doomsday strategy of assigning us homework before we go to see the new movie makes any sense.
Sensory gratification is something any new movie can provide, but let’s also assume that Disney+ picked those specific movies and that show because these are the ones that most closely match the spectacleof what they’re going to be releasing in December. In other words, they’re priming the audience to develop a craving for more of what they’ve already delivered.
OK, I can see how that might work. Maybe this whole idea is has more to it than I realized. Let’s keep going.
Intellectual stimulation is sort of the stock and trade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
I don’t mean that these movies are particularly intellectual on their own. They’re really not.
But they have all these little hooks and connections and references and background elements that are meant to be connective tissue to keep people interested.
And yes, if you have to watch 14 films and a 2-season show to be able to catch all of those elements in the new film, and maybe have a Ph.D. in reading Marvel comic books besides that, that’s at least going to be intellectually interesting when the movie comes out, right?
All right. On to the next tactic, which involves social approval. I… yeah, I don’t think this one’s actually going to work beyond maybe your fellow MCU fanatics in a Reddit community, because insisting on doing the assigned Disney+ homework to go see an Avengers movie is going to get you the opposite of social approval.
It might even get some concern circulating among your friends and family that you need to get outside a little more, maybe touch some grass, probably take up a different hobby entirely.
And this is where the Disney+ strategy falls apart for me, at least in this framework, because the benefit of all of that homework means preparing yourself for a 3-hour movie event that’s going to generate some personal momentary euphoria, perhaps, but which also might make you a little too invested in something that, quite honestly, most theater-goers are going to approach from a low-involvement framework of, “I need to get out of my house. Let’s go see that new Marvel movie.”
Also, there’s the chance that the movie pulls another Age of Ultron and turns out to disappoint fans of The Avengers. You might view all that time as being wasted and develop negative attitudes towards the brand.
This is one of the reasons why the thinking on involvement in marketing strategy has moved away from persuasion and into more of a consumer behavior model. In classrooms, today, we typically teach a refined version of multiple models that essentially says, “Consumers tend to spend more time researching unfamiliar or higher-priced products and tend to be more routine or habitual purchasers of low-priced or familiar products.”
Not always, but often enough that it holds pretty true most of the time.
So under that framework, I’d argue that Disney+’s assigned homework is actually the wrong strategy. This is the fifth Avengers movie and we’ve had dozens more Marvel Cinematic Universe films and shows. Anyone who wants that experience pretty much knows what they’re getting.
And anyone who doesn’t care anymore isn’t going to be enticed back in with the promise that if they watch 50 hours of content before December 18th, they’ll be ready for the next thing.
So predictably, the response to Disney+’s list of homework has been to make fun of it and to discuss all the films and shows that didn’t make the cut despite Marvel Studios making it seem like every one of them was part of this vast interconnected universe and essential to consume.
But audiences caught on awhile ago and that’s why they didn’t show up for things like The Eternals or The Marvels or The Thunderbolts* the same way they have for the most recent Spider-Man movie, which is content to mostly just be its own thing.
And that’s not a fluke. Nobody assigned people to read Homer before they went to see The Odyssey this summer, and it also has done pretty amazingly well.
Because it turns out, for most people, going to the movies isn’t about reading up on reviews or trying to catch every installment of a franchise.
For most people, it’s just about the very low-involvement need to just be entertained for a few hours.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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