What We Can Learn About Marketing From The Fast & The Furious Movies

Movies can teach us a lot of things. Their stories can hold morals and other lessons for the viewer, of course. But they also teach us other things, as well. For example, by studying the reasons that certain movies became wildly popular, many businesses can learn valuable lessons. What caused a low-budget movie to become a box office hit? Why did a movie no one thought would do well become wildly popular? Trying to answer these questions can help businesses to do better. Take the extremely popular movie franchise for example. It has had seven movies so far, and at least a couple more planned. What has kept this movie popular for so long? For one thing, it pulled off some top-notch marketing. So what sort of marketing lessons can a business learn from them?

The first movie in the franchise was a big hit and practically made Vin Diesel and Paul Walker stars. The saw Diesel not return and, despite its campiness it still did rather well at the box office, but not as well as the first. The movie was almost the end of the franchise, as Diesel and Walker both were out of the movie, and the box office draw of the leads it had was not enough for a sequel with limited ties to the previous movies.

The franchise almost died there, but Universal decided to take a chance and managed to pull off a veritable miracle with a great marketing scheme. How so? The top four actors returned for the installment, and Universal played that up for all it was worth by creating a sense of nostalgia for the early movies. They created a tag line, “New Model. Original Parts”, that they used on just about all their marketing material, which has since become almost classic, and sold the movie as the reunion everyone had been wanting. Universal essentially created in us a sense of missing something that we didn’t know we’d lost and managed to sell us something we didn’t know we wanted. It’s a brilliant move, especially if you can get someone to feel nostalgic about a movie series and eager to see the new one, even if they hadn’t seen any of the previous ones.

Thanks to this masterful marketing stroke, the fourth movie was a huge box office hit, as well as the and movies.  was a huge hit, and there are to be at least a couple of more. Have you seen the most recent eighth, The Fate of the Furious?

The popularity of the last few movies have had a lot of marketing done for them, but their popularity certainly owes the most to the marketing move for the fourth movie that practically brought the franchise back from the dead.

Businesses can learn from this move how powerful a sense of nostalgia can be for marketing, even if it is manufactured nostalgia. They can also see how great uniqueness and creativity can be as a marketing tool, as well as a sense of urgency to the project because they really needed it to work to breathe life into the franchise.

Marketers, especially mobile marketers, can also learn from the movie’s lessons such as:

1. Speed is king. With many more people shopping on their mobile devices, they don’t want to wait. Since mobile users are in a hurry and on-the-go, so keep ads short and to the point. Even people using desktops don’t like to wait for pages to load.

2. Make sure people can understand you. Keep ads simple, with simple visuals and fonts, minimal text, and clear CTAs.

3. Give your audience what they want. No matter how accurate your audience targeting might be, your CTAs have to promise them something worthwhile in return for their time and effort.

4. Relationships are key (relationships are at the core of the F&F movies). It’s easy enough to build relations with an audience who are non-mobile users, but it can also be done with mobile users and this shouldn’t be overlooked since it’s the only marketing channel that your audience actually carries with them all the time.

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