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Motion pictures: consumers, channels, and intuition.

Article Excerpt
Introduction

Eliashberg et al. (2006) have convincingly shown that the motion picture industry is a fruitful research domain for marketing scholars. The authors (hereafter referred to as EEL) cover many interesting issues, including the three stages of the movie-value chain--production, distribution, and exhibition. However, even a comprehensive review like this cannot be exhaustive, and in this comment, I discuss three additional topics about movies that need research and for which the marketing discipline has concepts, models, and theories to offer that can help. These topics are (i) consumer behavior with respect to movies, (ii) the movie marketing channel, and (iii) the role of intuition in managerial decision making with respect to movies.

Consumer Behavior

Interestingly, the EEL paper starts with the production of movies and ends with the exhibition of movies, while paying little attention to the movie consumer, who is--after all--the ultimate destination of the motion picture value chain. From a marketing point of view in which the customer drives the business, this is remarkable. Maybe in the motion picture industry, the consumer is the great unknown, and for that reason is somewhat obscure in the movie research literature. We think that more insight is needed in consumer behavior with respect to movies, and that existing concepts and analysis tools can help us to obtain this.

The consumer movie decision process can be divided into the well-known stages (Blackwell et al. 2001) of need recognition, search for information, evaluation of alternatives, purchase, consumption, and postconsumption evaluation. What do we know about these stages? In the stage of need recognition, supply elements seem to be important drivers (e.g., advertising, announcements in theaters), whereas word of mouth plays an important role in the stage of information search (Eliashberg et al. 2000). But we have little generalized empirical insights about how these decision processes go and how they are influenced by social and commercial stimuli. For example, is there an evoked set of movies from which a movie consumer chooses at a particular stage in the decision process, and if so, how large is it and what determines its composition?

The concepts and models we use for modeling consumer choice in other categories of consumer products and services can help us get more insight in choice behavior with respect to movies. For example, multidimensional scaling models...