How Spiderman Almost Became Homeless
- Mar 26, 2015
- 4 min read
In the mid-90s Marvel Comics, the company responsible for Spiderman, Iron Man, Wolverine, and Captain America went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
It was partly due to mismanagement and partly due to the slumping industry.
After bankruptcy, a new company bought Marvel Comics and formed Marvel Enterprise.
They decided to diversify but the most important decision they made was to reboot their franchises using Hollywood. They started with Men In Black, Blade, and then Spiderman.
You would have thought that Marvel would have made a ton of money from those films – each film grossed tens, sometimes hundreds of millions at the box office – but the fact was that they sold the rights to those movies for a small licensing fee.
They didn’t invest any money and as a result they didn’t gain much either. After all, this was a company that had no capital and therefore couldn’t afford the risk.
But as a result of these successful films Marvel made money by boosting comic book sales and toy merchandise. For Marvel, the films were essentially a 2-hour commercial for their products.
This is content marketing at its very best. It is about delievering entertainment to an audience so that they don’t even realize they are being marketed to.
In fact, this strategy was such a success Marvel was sold to Disney in 2009 for $4.3 Billion. Not a bad return of investment for a bankrupt company 15 years previously.
How Content Marking Can Work For You
This is only one example of what content marketing can do for a business. Of course not every company can leverage Hollywood like that, but now anybody can publish content – blogs, videos, podcast – easier and cheaper than ever before.
It can even work for boring markets like toilet paper. For example, Charmin created an app that allows you to find the nearest and best public toilet. How useful is that? And such a great way to stay top-of-mind to your customers.
Today, it has to go further than blogging or podcasting. It’s about providing a service in a new and interesting way.
Perhaps it’s creating your own Slideshare presentation or your very own Youtube channel. In fact, Youtube is probably one of the most under utilized social media platforms available.
Remember 1 billion people use Youtube and there are over 4 billion videos viewed daily. That is an incredibly powerful way to get your content across.
How Storytelling Can Boost Your Marketing to the Next Level
No matter what format you ultimately decide, your content should always have a story and a hero. Remember those Subway commericals with Jerry? The man who lost 200 pounds just from eating Subway?
That was a brilliant campaign because people could relate to Jerry and his journey.
The human brain remembers stories better than it remembers anything else.
In 2006, researchers in Spain did a test and found that storytelling actually activates different parts of the brain which help us remember better.
This is something humans have instinctively known since the dawn of civilization. That is why fables were created. Aesop was a slave, a nobody who lived in Ancient Greece. Yet we remember him because he teaches us through storytelling.
Think back to the old fairy tales; parents didn’t just tell their children not to go into the woods. They knew that kids naturally disobeyed authority so instead they thought up stories about evil witches and monsters that would eat children.
Content Marketing Can Sell Anything (Even Religion)
Content Marketing doesn’t just have to be about selling a product put can also sell an idea. If you grew up going to church, I bet you remember the stories from the Bible.
I will always remember how Jesus went into the desert and was tempted by the Devil. The moral is not to be led astray but it’s much more memorable as a story than a simple edict.
This is perhaps the earliest forms of content marketing known to us. In fact, the whole bible is content marketing for Christianity.
Another great example, this one modern, is of Copyblogger founder Brian Clarke and his new venture Rainmaker. Clarke is a genius because he can tell a story like no other.
According to some indigenous traditions, a rainmaker is someone who could pray to the Gods and create rain for a farmer’s crops, sustaining life.
In modern life, Clarke acquaints the Rainmaker with someone who can go out and generate leads and convert them into sales.
These are the people who sustain life for modern businesses. Although Rainmaker is still a new company, he has already created a mythology around it and a story that people will remember and associate with his brand.
What stories do you remember? How have you used Content Marketing to build your audience? If you need help building your audience email me at contact@joelmarkharris.com
If you want to find out how discoverable you are on the internet, check this tool out
Joel Mark Harris is a Canadian writer, marketer and speaker. (@joelmarkharris) He is the proud founder of Writers' Labatory and Scene2Studio. You can download your FREE Content Marketing Tool Kit Here
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