In 2011 the ‘word of mouth’ between women,
merely based on an erotic romantic novel, made Anastasia Steele and Christian
Grey famous all over the world. These women were talking about Fifty Shades of Grey, the story
that had over 40 million global sales. The
author responsible behind this successful book is the British writer E.L James.
In 2012, James published the second and third volumes of the book. The film
adaptation produced by Universal Pictures will be released this Valentine’s Day
2015. For sure the movie distributor,
including Universal, has a huge advantage in marketing and promotion for the
success of the book, mainly among women between the ages of 18 and 30 years,
however the distributors have been developing an attractive digital campaign to
capture the attention of a more diverse audience.
In November 2013, the marketing team
organized a photo shoot for Entertainment Weekly, with Dakota Johnson and Jamie
Dorman, who play the main characters. E.L James posted photos of the set on her
social media during the duration of the film shoot, giving fans of the book a
reason to follow all of the behind the scenes of the movie. On July 19th, 2014 Beyoncé posted a
mini-trailer on her Instagram account that includes a slower version of her hit “Crazy
in Love”, which is also the soundtrack of the movie, announcing the official
trailer release within the following days. July 24, 2014 was the release of the
movie trailer on the Today Show; it was a trending topic on Twitter throughout
the entire day. Other brands also took advantage of the movie to promote their
own products. One example was the tweet of Tide referring to the movie: “We won’t
judge guilty pleasures, we’re just here to #keepitclean”. To this day the
official trailer has almost 42 million views on Universal Pictures UK Channel.
In my opinion, nowadays, the marketing
strategies for movies have to be interactive in order to involve the audience
with the story of the film. Universal Studios did just that by announcing the Grey
Internship Program, in which
the fans download an app to be part of an ‘internship’ within Grey’s company that
would allow access to exclusive content of the movie as they complete specific
tasks. The app is available on Apple Store, Google Play and Amazon. This week
the movie reaches seven million fans on Facebook, and with it presently being
only a month before the actual release, it is possible to get tickets now on
the official movie’s web page. In addition, last weekend, during the broadcasting
of the Golden Globes, Universal released a new version of the trailer, and in
three days it has had over 4.6 millions views.
With these strategies, and the large fan
base of the book, Fifty Shades of Grey promises to be one of the biggest
box-office movies in 2015. According to Imbd predictions, the movie will collect 210 million
domestic and 590 million worldwide, even more than Big Block Buster films such
as Fast and Furious 7 and Minions which are also due to be released this year.
