Really enjoy the movie, or just missed a good one ? Part Ⅱ

As we mentioned before, a ‘bad’ movie makes a huge success. Since bad is a little strong, I’ll go with the word “average”. Another example is a recent movie in China; it’s called “Lost in Thailand -Tai Jiong”. This movie was the first domestic movie that sold more than 10 billions tickets and broke 10 records in Chinese Filming history. But as for the movie itself, is it really that good? I’m not sure it’s compatible to its success, at least not all the feedbacks are positive. but still, it’s a huge success and total surprised lots of people. The more people talk about it, the more success it can achieve. What you can do, the results showed everything. Now let’s see how they made a big advantage of social media. The total cost of filming this movie is 3 million, but the total investment in advertising is 3 billion. Even it is a huge expenditure, there is no TV commercial or advertising at all, it’s all about social media. Before the movie is on, the publisher released some funny clips and pictures from the movie to all kinds of websites, social networks and online video channels. And they ‘hired’ certain people to write reviews or blogs about the movie in social media networks, which is very vivid and believable. In addition, most of the time people can’t really tell whether it’s real or not, and don’t really bother to find out the reliability of it, they believe it’s true, and project the reflections on themselves. Since all people can reach is only part of it, and almost everyone around you is talking about it, it’s very possible you get intrigued and want to check it out. And all of these happened even before the movie is on. There is no harm and lost for people to buy one ticket and watch, right? 

Then when the movie is on, this buzz continues. People talked about it more, no matter they are good review or bad ones. Based on the effect of Sheep Flock, imagine you are in a social group and everyone else is talking about a certain thing and make fun about it, but you have no idea, don’t you want to join?Don't you want to find out ? The success of this movie played this physiological game of human beings very well, so it’s no longer about how funny or special the movie is, social media took the job over and made it to the next level.

If we think about it, this is a really interesting phenomenon, how people are played and nudged by the effects of social media. And that’s why sometimes we may watch an average movie but miss a really good one. For businesses in other industry, same working philosophy, how businessmen play with it is the real wisdom.