Twitter enabled negative word-of-mouth to instantly affect Bruno at the box office

Posted by Eric on July 15, 2009
Business, Entertainment, Movies
Share

Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy about an Austrian fashion journalist, opened to $14.2 million last Friday night. Then, the movie experienced a drastic decline in sales between Friday and Saturday, causing it to fall as much as $20 million short of some expectations for opening weekend.

Many experts speculated that negative word-of-mouth caused the sharp sales decline for Brüno, as social media sites like Twitter are enabling word-of-mouth to affect releases instantly. Time magazine said Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter, and that Friday is the new weekend when measuring box office success.

Brüno was a trending topic on Twitter throughout opening weekend. We decided to use Social Radar to analyze the sentiment of comments posted on Twitter throughout the last week.

Sentiment was overwhelmingly positive leading up to the opening, with more than 90% positive comments on July 6. But as the movie opening on July 10, the number of negative comments increased sharply, with almost 50% negative sentiment on opening weekend. Words like rotten, uncomfortable and gross appeared frequently throughout posts.

bruno-sentiment

Twitter and other social media sites are empowering consumers to make more informed purchase decisions. With this new level of transparency and instant consumer reviews, product launches cannot hide behind marketing to tell the story.

As we discussed in our post about the angry United Airline customer who gained massive attention with his YouTube complaint, consumers are influencing each other directly more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before. How can companies maintain control of their brands in today’s transparent world?

Tags: , ,

4 Comments to Twitter enabled negative word-of-mouth to instantly affect Bruno at the box office

Wogan
July 15, 2009

Maintain control over brands? Simple - be honest.

If your brand, marketing message and consumer perceptions are out of line, there’s a much bigger problem. SM isn’t creating this issue - it’s just bringing it to attention.

Matthew Snodgrass
July 15, 2009

I love all of your Social Radar graphs. In this case, however, I think the interpretation may be off. For a movie like Bruno, seemingly and otherwise negative phrases like “uncomfortable” and “gross” actually work in his favor. This is and has been his intention (see Borat).

LM
July 16, 2009

Work in his favor?

Falling $20 million short is not working in his favor…

The truth is, you can’t fool the public anymore.

The concept that it won’t matter what they think, because you already got their $9 and word-of-mouth is too slow to effect revenue is nearing its end.

The world is becoming more and more real-time and these pathetic attempts at entertainment will die more quickly as they should.

Although my opinion is bias as I don’t enjoy awkward, unintelligent and classless humor.

Sorry.

optimizerx
August 24, 2009

These case studies should also serve as a wake up call for big brands accustomed to glossing over their product deficiencies by massive over promotion.

Informed & vocal consumers in mass, not brand managers, are now in charge of deciding what’s viable.

Leave a comment

WP_Big_City