Different movies attract different audiences, hence it is a powerful segmentation tool in itself. What can we find if we compare people’s choice of movies with their purchasing behaviour?
Kantar Worldpanel runs an out-of-home panel which tracks what food and beverage consumers purchase away from home across 27 major Chinese cities. Between August 19 and 21, we asked panellists what movies they had watched recently. At that time, the major movies on air included (sorted by box revenue from highest to lowest):
Wolf Warrior 2 《战狼2》, Despicable Me 3 《神偷奶爸3》, Once Upon a Time 《三生三世十里桃花》, The Founding of An Army 《建军大业》, Guilty of Mind 《心理罪》, Brotherhood of Blades 2 《绣春刀2》, The Adventurers 《侠盗联盟》, Twenty Two 《二十二》, Legend of the Naga Pearls 《鲛珠传》, Da Hu Fa 《大护法》 and Big Ear Tutu 《大耳机图图》
We compare these panellists choice of movies with their purchasing of food and beverage out-of-home in the past 12 months (from August, 2016 till July, 2017) to see if there is any link between the categories/brands and movies. And here are some primary findings:
* Wolf Warrior 2, which set the Chinese movie box revenue record at 5.6 billion yuan, was a vastly distant leader in popularity: 69% of respondents had watched it, while none other movies surpassed 17%. The top three of the rest are Despicable Me 3 (16%), The Founding of An Army (16%) and Once Upon a Time (15%);
Apparently, many viewers of Wolf Warrior 2 are not“normal movie-goers”. To factor out the unusual movie-goers’“pollution”, in the rest of the article, all data don’t include those related to Wolf Warrior2 audiences. If a person watched both Wolf Warrior 2 and The Founding of An Army, then all data related to him/her as a Founding of An Army audience will be kept.
* The top three most frequent categories that movie goers would buy out-of-home are beer (12.5%), packaged water (12.3%) and tea drink (11.2%);
(Purchasing frequency ratio = the times of movie-goer respondents had bought a certain category divided by their total purchasing times of all categories from August, 2016 till July, 2017.)
* Purchasing record supports our abovementioned assumption that different movies attract different types of people. For example, audiences of Despicable Me 3 are tea drink fans (12.3%), 1.1 percentage points higher than average; while they are less interested in beer because their beer buying frequency ratio was 2.8 percentage points lower than average (9.7% vs 12.5%). While the audiences of Founding of An Army are just the opposite: they are more likely to buy beer than average (15.8% vs 12.5%), but not so keen in tea drinks (9.3% vs 11.5%);
* Once Upon a Time caused huge controversy over its allegedly fake box revenue. However, our data showed that it actually was the most popular movie among female audiences (21%) and 90s generation (20%), except Wolf Warrior 2. Its audience’s choices of food and drinks also reflected this demographic group: tea drinks (12.3% vs average 11.2%), ice cream (12.1% vs 10.9%) and yogurt (9.9% vs 9.3%) are the three categories that they had bought frequently;
* The documentary film Twenty Two became a surprise box success after many social media articles called for people’s attention to it. The movie, which interviewed 22 surviving Chinese comfort women who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during World War II, earned 170 million yuan – an astronomical revenue for a documentary in China. Our data showed that its audiences are more likely to be younger people: its penetration among 80s and 90s generation was both 5%, while that among 70s and 60s generation was only 1%. However, from their purchasing record we could see they were not normal young people: they bought least beer among all movie audiences (6.4% vs 12.5%), not so much yogurt (8.3% vs 9.3%), but they are very likely to buy tea drinks (16.5% vs 11.2%) and packaged water (14.5% vs 12.3%);
* The audiences of Brotherhood of Blades 2 are most ardent fans of coffee, as the purchasing frequency ratio nearly doubled average: 10.4% vs 5.4%;
* It is true that tea drinks are popular among all movie-goers. But the most popular tea brand is not an FMCG brand – it’s freshly made tea sold by various tea shops, such as Yidiandian (一点点) , 50 Lan (50岚), Royaltea (皇茶), Coco-tea (都可奶茶), etc. Among the audiences of Once Upon a Time, when they bought a tea drink, 52.5% of the purchases were buying a freshly made tea, the number for Guilty of Mind audiences was 55.3%, and 56.2% for Twenty Two audience.
Then what inspirations brands could draw from these findings?
1. Kantar Worldpanel data could match people’s choices of movies with their buying behaviour. As many video websites would buy movies to show on their sites and online pre-roll commercial an important marketing tool for FMCG brands, we are confident that these links we have accumulated will be able to help brands improve efficiency of these ads;
2. By mining these growing data, we could predict which movies would be more appealing to which segment of consumers. Thus, brands can have data to support which movies to work with to launch franchise products. Movie producers will also have much better guidance as which type of brands to talk to;
3. If you want to open a milk tea shop, then the ideal location is very obvious: places near cinemas!
EDITOR'S NOTES
* Kantar Worldpanel account executive Lincoln Chen also contributed to this article;
* To reach the author, or to know more information, data and analysis of China's FMCG market, please contact us ;