Marvel Marketing Strategy

A look at the history of business shows that there are no firms that consistently perform better than marvel. One minute a corporation is wonderful, the next it is foolish. The firm as a whole does not seem to be an adequate unit of study when looking for the origins of high performance, it would seem.

Every management effort and decision that goes into producing a new market-generating product or service constitutes a strategic move. These strategic movements generated goods and services that opened and grabbed new market space with a considerable increase in demand, as seen in the following blue ocean strategy example.

Super-Powerful Example of Going From Red to Blue Ocean

The Hulk, Spider-Man, and a slew of other Marvel heroes should be recognised to everyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last half a century. Marvel is a terrific example of a red ocean to blue ocean transition in contemporary business history, which you may not be aware of.

What are some of the most popular movies of the recent decade? The box office success of Marvel films continues year after year. The Avengers, Age of Ultron, Infinity War, Endgame, and Black Panther are the five highest-grossing superhero films of all time, accounting for half of the lifetime top ten grossing films of all genres.. As a matter of fact, Endgame has become the 2nd highest-grossing film in the history of cinema. These all came out of Marvel.

However, Marvel's fortunes were not always so rosy. The company emerged from bankruptcy two decades ago with USD $250 million in high-interest debt, a destroyed sales channel, dissatisfied consumers, and a skeletal team of workers. They had a hard time paying its employees because of the limited cash flow.

Marvel's Beginnings

Marvel Comics was founded in 1939, when superheroes were out of style. Captain America was created to inspire Americans to support WWII. Marvel's unoriginal,'me-too' comic book sector nearly shuttered in the 1960s. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko agreed to create a new kind of superhero; first a human and then a superhero.

Marvel introduced fresh, complicated characters that appealed to college students, who weren't comic book purchasers before. From 1960 to 1964, Marvel debuted 8,000 characters, including Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Hulk, and The X-Men. Marvel's comics grew.

In the 1980s, Marvel's new owners used a red ocean strategy to drain the brand's worth. Management pocketed hundreds of millions while decimating Marvel's employees and retail outlets, alienating and confusing consumers. Eventually the business failed.

Marvel's Strategic Blue Ocean Manoeuver

A turnaround specialist named Peter Cuneo was named Marvel's CEO in 1999. In little over a decade, he is credited with rescuing Marvel from bankruptcy and securing its $4 billion sale to Disney. Entering the motion picture sector was Cuneo and Marvel's most important blue ocean strategic pivot; Marvel Studios, which brought the corporation roaring back to prosperity in the 21st century, was born of this pivot.

Furthermore, Marvel and Cuneo revolutionized the whole filmmaking process; that is, they profoundly altered the way movies are created. Strategically, Marvel shifted into a new market, but also rebuilt that market to create a blue ocean.

How Marvel Broke the Trade-off Between Value and Price

There is a widely held idea in business that organizations may either provide more value to consumers at a higher cost or provide acceptable value at the same price point to customers. When seen in this light, strategy is viewed as a value-cost trade-off between distinction and low cost. A red ocean strategist has this frame of mind.

Marvel, on the other hand, pursued both distinction and low cost concurrently by adopting a blue ocean strategy. Let's take a look at Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's Four Actions Framework to see how this works.

For the framework to break the trade-off between distinctiveness and cheap cost, it asks four important questions:

• What aspects of the business are taken for granted?
• Whose standards should be reduced significantly?
• What aspects should be elevated much beyond what is considered typical in the industry?
• Which aspects of the market have still to be developed?

If you're wondering how Marvel broke the value-cost trade-off, go no farther than the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC) Grid.

Marvel’s ERRC Grid

(Image credit: Blue Ocean Team)

The Marvel blue ocean example shows how a corporation exploited distinctiveness and low costs to reclaim its blue ocean business model. Marvel was able to reclaim its blue ocean by joining the film business and redefining the motion picture production paradigm based on value innovation.