I am here at the ESOMAR Congress in Berlin and today heard a keynote by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarch, the Oscar winning director.
The obvious question: why a director as keynoter at an MR event?
The answer: without MR the movie might never had seen the light of day. The film had no mass appeal and virtually every distributor in Germany rejected it as “too dark and too intellectual.” It just did not fit the tastes of the general theatre going public, the center of the normal distribution. One distributor was creative enough to ask its MR staff to find the right audience and to test it with that audience. By putting together a test audience composed of exclusively of college graduates rather than a representative sample of the total population the researchers estimated that two million Germans would go to the see the movie if properly positioned and advertised. That’s the definition of a hit movie. When it was all said and done 2.3 million Germans went through the turnstiles.
While the term never came up, this struck me as a classic example of the long tail. The movie holds little appeal to the general population for which market researchers generally advise their clients to create products. Still, there are enough people out in the tail of the distribution to make the movie a huge success if those people can be identified and marketed. It’s a case of MR supporting innovation, art, and culture. An unusual tale.