What the ‘Twilight’ Franchise Teaches Us about Marketing

What the ‘Twilight’ Franchise Teaches Us about Marketing

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As the film series edges towards a monstrous close later this year, the Twilight marketing machine will be ramping up again very soon.

Regardless if you're a rabid, screaming, and fainting fan or think that the films are based off of horribly written drivel that happens to feature devastatingly gorgeous people, there are some applicable marketing lessons found within.

So, sit back, absorb the infinite marketing wisdom contained in the Twilight marketing machine and try not to claw each other's eyes out over Edward or Jacob.

1. Grassroots Marketing Efforts Can Lead to a Global Phenomenon

The release of the Twilight books was nothing to write home about. It wasn't until teenage girls and their overly supportive mothers told a friend about the books.

Word-of-mouth propelled an unmemorable series into pop culture and into the leering sights of Hollywood.

Studying the global impact of Twilight is a master class in marketing. With absolutely no budget, and a hope and a prayer for success, the fans of the series propelled it into our vernacular.

Other, non-Hollywood brands, have harnessed the velocity of grassroots marketing to great success. Most companies are focused on The Big Picture rather than looking to what they can accomplish locally. That's at the heart of grassroots marketing.

2. People Will Buy Just About Anything if It's Packaged Correctly

As a writer, you know exactly what I'm talking about: when I read the Twilight series (out of curiosity, of course), I actually grabbed my lucky red pen and circled my little heart out over the painfully written prose.

I kept thinking: how could something this bad be unleashed to the unsuspecting masses?

Between the obvious grammatical mistakes and perversion of the English language, I couldn't get over how popular the series actually became. The dialogue was straight out of a 7th grade creative writing class. The character development, was, well, missing. Everything felt just wrong about the books but somehow the world fell under its spell.

What works about the Twilight machine is that everything surrounding it – books, movies, gears and other assorted products – fits into what Stephanie Meyer originally created.

Sometimes its what's on the cover that matters more than what's on the inside.

3. Classic Sells

Twilight is Romeo & Juliet.

Twilight is an epic story about the ongoing fight between good and evil.

Twilight, with all of its crappy writing, lured the world into its lair. Why? The story is age-old, traditional and familiar. We've heard this story thousands of times before (certainly with better developed characters) but we all are still drawn to it.

The story is a new twist on a classic, and that's part of the reason for its success. Instead of trying to recreate the wheelset by Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies, Ms. Meyer just took two supernatural creatures that were already at odds, added an improbable love interest and wrote a story around them.

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Looking for more marketing tips that don't involve vampires? Check out one of our many online marketing blogs that cover fax marketing, Twitter marketing, and even press release marketing.

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