Spider-Man: Brand Love's Way Home

Social-listening and crowd-pleasing done right - that's the most Marvel-lous (no pun intended) thing about Spider-Man: No Way Home, a true masterclass of why you must keep listening to your audience. By deeply learning about their fans, Marvel & Sony managed to remove the bittersweet taste that previous Spider-Man movies had left to fans, which ended loving the three Spider-Men more than ever.

Okay, so what was the need for listening to fans in Spider-Man?

Back in 2010, Sony officially announced Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 4 cancellation after four unsatisfactory revisions of the script, leaving fans around the world devastated after knowing it was the end of Tobey Maguire's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The franchise had a not-so-satisfactory storyline conclusion in Spider-Man 3, and got its reboot right away in 2012, with Sony released The Amazing Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield in the leading role.

Garfield gave his entire heart to incarnate the wallcrawler, but critics and fans around the world couldn't help to feel the absence of Maguire, with some even claiming Garfield was "too cool for the role". TASM movies where strongly criticized but had a very good performance at the international box office. Still, Sony decided to cancel the project after two movies, which led them to open negotiations with Marvel Studios and introduce Tom Holland's reboot of the character to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Tom Holland's portrayal of the character was a fresh, juvenile performance of Spider-Man in his high school years, but the MCU agenda ended up punishing the character's development. Holland's Spider-Man became criticized by fans for depending so much on his mentor Iron Man, giving him great tech from Iron Man instead of responsibility.

Revindicated: The magic of listening

Spider-Man: No Way Home gave a wonderful closure to all three versions of the web-headed. After Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse's success in 2018, Sony & Marvel knew that the multiverse could exist and be done right. Fans around the world were supplicating both studios to get Tobey and Andrew to join Holland in their suits again, and last month we finally saw the three Spider-Men together.

The movie had all three Spider-Men playing an important role in the story and it was fantastic to see the great chemistry among the three actors. We finally got a conclusion to Maguire's version after Spider-Man 3, we were devastated by the path Garfield's had gone through after losing Gwen Stacy, and we got to see Willem Dafoe's ruthless Green Goblin pushing Holland's version to the limit of morality, who truly learned about the huge responsibility that comes with the mask. Acting was on point, but the true winner of this movie was its outstanding delivery of being a Spider-Man movie fans would love.

It was a crowd-pleasing love letter done right. Fans were sharing theories and script ideas in Reddit months before the movie came out, leaked footage led conversations in Twitter and allowed the studios to learn what was going on in the minds of the fans, and the movie had easter eggs in it that made it relevant (for example, Willem Dafoe's quote in Raimi's franchise, "You know, I'm something of a scientist myself", became a popular meme among fans in recent years, that we were pleased to see referenced in Spider-Man: No Way Home). Marvel & Sony were listening.

Listen to your audience, they'll love you for it

Today, people around the world want to see more of the three Spider-Men and even have started online petitions to get Sony to continue Andrew Garfield's franchise parallelly to Tom Holland's. We live in an ever-changing world that requires us to actively listen to our customers. We must always be testing, learning, and adapting, and listening is a crucial element of learning. Sony & Marvel didn't understand what had to be done with the characters until they stopped to listen. Once we listen, we understand.

Adapting is not a strategy to reverse failure. It is what we must do as we listen and learn about our customers. And my friend, finding out what your customers really want is the true definition of success as a brand. Brands that do not learn cease to exist, while brands that learn and adapt, succeed.