Strategic Brand Management: Brand Strategy

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Strategic Brand Management: Hunger Game’s Catching Fire Case
The Hunger Games is a film series that started in 2012 when the franchise’s first movie was released. A year later, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second movie in the franchise was released. This second one set a number of records, among them, the largest November opening weekend. However, it is not the level of creativity of the producers and directors, or the talent of the actors that made this possible. Most of the opening success of this movie is credited to its gifted marketing team. The team skillfully combined online and offline campaign platforms to instill some must-watch urge in the fans.
One of the main marketing techniques that were used by the movie’s marketing crew was the brand storytelling platform. In essence, this method used new platforms of distribution to develop unique and customized consumer experiences. It made use of the characters and pumped in elements like emotion, humor, and personality to keep the audience entertained and engaged (Sawhney and Pallavi 2). This method was particularly powerful in developing a connection to the audience, and that was quite essential since publicizing some of the information that the fan base already had from the novels would have only bored them and taken their attention off the campaign.
To reach the maximum number of people they could, the marketing team decided to do the brand storytelling across different media platforms.

The key aim of this transmedia storytelling campaign was to make stories about the movie trend across all the online platforms that the team was making use of. In particular, the brand used Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to reach their target audience for this transmedia campaign. The people that were being targeted on these campaigns were the already existing fans from the novels. Through these people, the marketing team was hoping to get their movie to trend before its release, and it worked.
What they did was give each social media platform a specific role to play in the campaign. Some of them, like the Capitol Couture, which focused on the fashion of the capital, were not very relevant and ended up confusing some fans (Sawhney and Pallavi 4). However, they still got people talking about the movie and sharing it across whatever platforms they could. Moreover, the audience was allowed to shape the campaign’s story by enrolling for competitions and posting pictures and videos on the brand’s pages. Through this method, Capitol’s page on Facebook managed to get more than 10 million likes, their Twitter handle had at least 850,000 followers, and their trailer on YouTube was among the most viewed videos (Sawhney and Pallavi 7). What is more, the film brought in $158.1 million on its opening weekend at the box office and hit the $864.9 million figure globally within the same period (Sawhney and Pallavi 7). Despite the success of the online platforms, the marketers still used traditional media like TV and prints to supplement their efforts. Evidently, the marketing campaign was a total success.
Following the record-breaking achievements registered by Catching Fire, it would be shocking if the franchise does not use some of the proven methods in marketing its upcoming film Mockingjay Part 1. As explained in the paper, a lot of things worked for the Catching Fire team. Nonetheless, the transmedia storytelling campaign stood out. It helped the franchise create a lot of buzz around the movie’s release. Therefore, if the team has to keep one thing in that marketing campaign to use in the upcoming movie, then, it should be the transmedia storytelling. The method did not require too much money as most of the participants who helped to hype the movie were not even sucked into the idea for any money. They were only given certain privileges that gave them bragging rights among their peers concerning the film. However, this time, the discussions should try to be as relevant to the story as possible to avoid the confusion raised by the Capitol Couture – talking points can be developed from less known but relevant themes in the novel.

Work Cited
Sawhney, Mohanbir, and Pallavi Goodman. “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Using Digital
and Social Media for Brand Storytelling.” Northwest Kellog School of Management, 9 Sept. 2016.