Issues in Interdisciplinarity 2019-20/Power in Film Preferences

Introduction

This article discusses power within the interdisciplinary field of marketing, using research into individual film preferences as a case study. Marketing outlines and provides logical ground for the techniques that merchants use to sell their products. Specifically, social marketing is “the adaptation...of commercial marketing...as a means to induce behavioural change in a targeted audience on a temporary or permanent basis to achieve a social goal”, which implies the need for power, or the ability to produce an effect. Therefore, due to its natural dependency on power, marketing, as a discipline, can be better understood by analyzing the power dynamics within it through exploring people’s film preferences from different political, economic, and biological backgrounds.

Why Film Preferences

Companies and associations often depend on films and television programs to advocate their ideas or products. Since marketing involves “not selling just goods and services but were also offering solutions to customer problems”, it is granted the power to provide solutions, or at least placebos, to the problems that a particular cohort of society is facing. These solutions are often biased towards a particular political, economic, or biological stance depending on where the prevailing power of society is at the time. Therefore, revealing the power dynamics in marketing would be a crucial step in order to determine the effect of marketing on people’s aesthetic values.

Biological Power in Marketing

From a biological perspective, marketing is essentially about understanding human behaviour. Similar to how ecologists need to grasp behavioural patterns and drivers of the fauna and flora in a habitat in order to understand the entire ecosystem, marketers need to consider biological factors, such as age and gender to best understand the motivations of their target audiences.

In the context of film preferences, both age and gender are demographic core factors which determine individual preferences, and therefore affect how films will be marketed. With age segmentation, marketing can be aimed at specific life cycle stages: children, adolescents, middle-age, and seniors or be generation-based: baby boomers, millennials, generation Z. Gender segmentation is relatively more straightforward, mainly distinguishing between males and females.

PepsiCo faced online backlash and accusations of being sexist when they were rumoured to be launching "Lady Doritos", targeted at females who would prefer eating Doritos in a less messy manner.

Demographic segmentation is paramount when marketing films, as research has shown that younger moviegoers typically prefer comedy, animation, and comic book film genres, while older moviegoers prefer dramas, documentaries, and classic films. Similarly, females are typically more inclined to watch romantic genres over males, while males prefer action genres over females. Therefore, embracing adaptable marketing is critical as members of different age/gender groups usually have distinctive thought processes and attitudes towards what appeals to them. However, it is important to note that the concept of film genres is linked to the legacy of imperialism, as the concept of a film having a single ‘genre’ predominantly exists for Western films, whereas non-Western films such as Bollywood films usually mesh several different genres into one.

Overall, since marketing itself is interdisciplinary, successful marketing requires more than just demographic segmentation through a biological perspective. An example of overreliance on gender segmentation was when Doritos nearly launched “Lady Doritos” targeted at women, which received immediate online backlash for being sexist. Hence, marketing strategies must also reflect other disciplines, such as politics and economics, where factors such as political attitudes and income of consumers are studied to better identify consumer realities.

Economic Power in Marketing

From an economic perspective, it is possible to segment the population into different income groups. In marketing, it is common to have different press as representatives of different socio-economic groups, as they themselves target specific groups. For example, the readers of Financial Times or The Times might be more interested in politics or finance, whereas readers of The Sun might be more interested in celebrities and videogames (making them more favourable targeting audience for film campaigns)

Different forms of media also help marketers target different economic groups more precisely. Since dramatic or documentary film genres appeal more to older and often wealthier members of the population, specific adverts may be placed in taxis to target audiences of higher income brackets who use taxis more frequently than lower income earners. A similar phenomenon was observed in China, with the marketing of the arthouse film Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It achieved tremendous box office success by targeting audiences on the app DouYin (Tik Tok in oversea markets), which is predominantly used by “Average Joe[s]”, with a campaign which promotes its romance.

Segmenting the population also makes price discrimination possible as different socio-economic groups have different levels of expenditure. The ideal situation for marketers is to persuade everyone to pay the maximum affordable price that they consider acceptable (consumer surplus). Price discrimination is employed to maximise revenue this way. Price discrimination recognises groups and sets different prices respectively, e.g. “college students are willing to pay less than yuppies”. In the case of the film, students, veterans, and seniors are usually granted lower price to attract attendance. This low-cost strategy is usually marketed as a concession to target the groups that have lower income, while the cost is still significantly lower.

Political Power in Marketing

One of the main ideas in marketing is to respect the norm, or the appropriate behavior, of the society, which is largely influenced by the government as “deviations from norms are punished by sanctions”. Therefore, “all films are political” because they will follow the norms of the targeted country, which supports a particular political view. For instance, after the Civil Rights Movements in the United States, many Civil Rights Melodrama are streamed on television, including the television program Any Day Now. This television program focuses on the two female protagonists, one from each race, in a family setting and uses their daily life to represent the United States during the movement. This program reflects the United States government’s will to “heal racism” through trivializing the matter of racial discrimination to “…the individual and the family rather than on social movements and institutions”. Therefore, the success of Any Day Now can be contributed partly to its “political correctness”. On the other hand, when a film fails to fit into the political norm, it is likely that it would be resisted by the government and will never make it to the screen in a particular country. Zhangke Jia’s A Touch of Sin is banned from screening in China because of its focus on violence done by unsatisfied labourers. It is banned because it portrays the negative aspects of the government system, which is against the social norm in China.

Conclusion

Ever since Lumiere’s first screening of Sortie d’usine, films have been regarded as objective means of presenting “living portraits”. However, when talking about mainstream films that aim to make it to the cinema, that objectivity no longer exists due to marketing. The interplay of power between different disciplines in marketing has shaped individual film preferences by appealing to different biological cohorts of the population through demographic segmentation, use of different advertising based on income segmentation and adaptation to the political climate of the target country. Therefore, as shown from viewpoints in biology, economics and politics, the understanding of marketing is not complete without looking at it interdisciplinarily.