Actually, You Do Want to Reinvent the Wheel - Lessons on Product Innovation from Hollywood

Excerpted from free to access, much longer column available at Marketing Week.

Originally movies were a 90-minute narrative that never occurred again. When Humphrey Bogart told Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca that this was going to be “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” we did not get to see how that played out in sequel called ‘Casablanca II – Friends Indeed’. The final, famous Rosebud scene in Citizen Kane did not lead to a prequel in which a young Charles Foster Kane learns to love and laugh in ‘Young Boy Kane – The Sledding years’. And when ET finally made it onto the spaceship and flew home we did not get to see him actually touch down on an alien planet in ‘ET2 – Return to Planet Xylox’.

Of course, there were exceptions. Star Wars was always designed to be a series and its various sequels and prequels opened the eyes of many in Hollywood to the commercial possibilities of re-using characters in further films. The Godfather Part II proved that a subsequent variation can sometimes prove superior to the original. But in the 20th Century these were exceptions to an otherwise widespread rule that you made a movie and then you started again with a blank page.

Things really started to change in the nascent 21st Century as movie studios realised that coming up with a successful new script, new characters and new settings was an incredibly hard thing to replicate. Why not take a success and the characters that audiences had already warmed to and take that journey further? Rather than invent a new movie each time, why not re-invent around an existing blockbuster instead?

The transition is stunning as you can see from the table above (original Box Office data courtesy of Box Office Mojo & IMDB). In the eighties only two of the top grossing films at the US box office were re-invented variants of earlier movie incarnations: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It was a similar story in the next decade as only two re-worked movies – The Phantom Menace and Terminator 2 – made the top ten list for the nineties. But by the noughties the number leaps to eight out of ten with the likes of Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Toy Story and the Pirates of the Caribbean all remaking themselves into new movie offerings. So far six of the top seven movies this decade have also been re-worked movies with the Avengers, more Star Wars, Lego and the Hunger Games all re-using their initial movies to make more movies.

The lesson for brands should be clear. Rather than reaching far and wide for “disruptive” innovations that usually fail and often cost the earth, learn to innovate closer to home. First cut back the SKUs so that the successful products become the focus once again. Then, interrogate their formulas, their consumption and their lead users for potentially lucrative ways to innovate around the existing offer to make even more money. It’s not just a safer and less expensive way to create products, in many cases the subsequent innovations are more satisfying and commercially successful than the original products that inspired them.

Of course creative geniuses and film fans will bemoan the fact that this focus on reworking existing IP is less innovative and ultimately rewarding from a creative point of view. I totally agree. But I work in marketing, not creativity and the valencing of total innovation over commercial impact is one that haunts our industry. The continued commercial success of the global movie industry in box office terms stands as a perfect illustration of the commercial power of smaller, less radical innovation to deliver significant financial returns. Yes, we might not get so many amazing and innovative new films, but its called show business not show innovation for a reason.

It's an interesting insight, and one I talk about at length here in my column for Marketing Week in the context of work I have been doing with a large beauty brand.

Comments and insights very welcome.