Abstract

 

 

This study proposes to use both economics and psychology literature and analysis techniques in order to understand how the willingness to pay of college student movie consumers is influenced whether they have watched a teaser or a trailer. The shown movie trailers and teasers were chosen with caution and participants were tested with an online-questionnaire. The results which were found are interesting in terms of marketing and advertising techniques for the movie industry.

 

Keywords: trailers, teasers, movie advertisement, willingness to pay, fluency, mediation

 

Introduction

 

 

The 2008 economic global crisis have had terrible consequences on different sectors of the worldwide economy, except for the movie industry. Indeed, the movie industry income did not decrease, and people still buy movie tickets even if one might have thought that the entertainment sector could have been the first one injured by the decrease of the purchasing power of consumers. It may be interesting to wonder why movies still have an increasing success by analyzing their marketing techniques. A lot of money is spent on advertising movies, and the biggest part of the budget is dedicated to trailers. Indeed, trailers are in fact the window of the movie and influence movie consumers in their purchasing acts. However, it has been claimed that trailers give too much information about the movie: they might be a reason of disappointment when consumers actually watch the movie since they already know the key-scenes, or they may make people not going to see the movie since they feel like they already know the story. Nevertheless, there exists another way of advertising movies: the teaser, which is not used very often (and almost not used at all in France) which does not give away the entire structure of the advertised movie, but excites the curiosity of the consumers in only thirty seconds. The point of this study is to compare these two ways of advertising movies to understand which one is the most efficient. Section 1 will present the movie marketing industry in its whole as well as strict definitions of trailers and teasers. Section 2 is providing the psychological background of this study in terms of information processing. In section 3, we will see how an economic background may help us finding answers. Section 4 puts the tested hypothesis and its experiment forward. In section 5, the results are presented and analyzed.

Section 6 will focus on discussing and concluding.

 

 

 

 

Literature Review

 

 

The Movie Marketing Industry

 

When the world is going through a major economic crisis, the motion picture industry is going through a major growth (Finsterwalder et al., 2012). Indeed, in 2008, movie theatre purchased tickets in the US increased by approximately 16% compared with 2007 (Cieply and Barnes, 2009). According to the Motion Picture Association of America (2012), in 2011, the worldwide box office reached a historic high of 32.6 billion dollar. Nevertheless, there are not a lot of movies which actually earn money when they are in theatres (Vogel, 1998). That is why it is becoming increasingly important for a movie marketer to manage to attract a large audience through an effective promotional campaign. Producing studios are used to spend around 10 million dollars on the basic marketing technique (posters, market research, movie stars, premieres) and another 30 million dollars to buy media space. According to Munoz (2005), film advertisements will reach an audience within movie theatres, where there are people willing to watch movies in general. Film marketers thus consider movie trailers as being the most important marketing tool so that they will spend most of their budget to have their trailer placed just before the beginning of a popular and awaited movie, when the movie theatre is full of willing moviegoers (Flanagan, 2012). A well-done and well-distributed trailer will always play a role in a movie success on its first week of release (Gray, 2010).

 

 

Definition of a movie trailer

 

A film trailer is a short movie providing a one to three minutes cinematic experience which displays pictures from a film and which emphasizes its quality on purpose; their goal is indeed to promote a film’s theatrical release (Kernan, 2004). That is why film trailers are generally considered as advertisements that give to movie consumers an abstract of the movie.

 

According to Lisa Kernan again, who wrote Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers, a movie trailer is, “a unique narrative of film exhibition, wherein promotional discourse and narrative pleasure are conjoined.” Belch and Belch (2007) consider film trailers to be an affective form of advertising since they have this visual and emotional nature which make them affective products. Trailers are usually shown before a movie a particular audience has come to watch (Hixson, 2006).

 

As explained previously, film trailers are the most effective way to promote a movie. Another important phenomenon which must not be forgotten is that movie trailers are influencing consumer expectations (Hixson, 2006). This is what Bridges (1993) is interested in: he focuses on the content and overall style of the trailers and their influences on moviegoers expectations. He underlines the fact that consumers establish their expectations about films based on their situation: for instance, going to the movies with one’s partner instead of taking one’s family out for a family evening. Film trailers should therefore accurately display the genre of the movie (Bridges, 1993). People then create their expectations for a film based on the way it was advertised, which is why they will be more satisfied by the movie if it meets their expectations. For instance, when a movie is promoted as an experience for the family, consumers will assume it will be family friendly. However, when the film is perceived as a drama, then the family-oriented expectation will not be met.

 

What a movie teaser actually is and its interest

 

The trailer is the movie preview, and the teaser is the trailer preview. In the US, the teaser campaign starts many weeks before the film’s release, sometimes even before the movie production is even finished. So, what are the differences between a trailer and a teaser? A first teaser usually contains the previous tagline, some catchy words and phrases, screen shots and clips, or transitions in the middle of the video. This is meant to create awareness and publicity, in order to make people want to watch whether the trailer or the movie. Whenever the main

trailer advertising campaign starts, the teaser campaign stops (Septak, 2008). However, teasers must not be considered lightly. Indeed, there exist movie consumers thinking that “movie previews were giving away too much” (“Trailer Trash,” 1998, p. 10). The only goal of these teasers is to do exactly what they named after: to tease people with the trailer. It means that they are shorter and show just a little about the movie, even if it is not easy to understand. It really makes a noticeable change compared with the long trailers. However, it seems that now people need to know everything about what they are going to watch before they actually decide to go to the movies, so that they are insured they will not regret their choice (MacKenzie, 2007). It is thus common that most of the surprises (the scary or funny moments) are usually given away in the longer trailer. We will thus try to understand the psychological mechanisms that are hidden behind this phenomenon.

 

 

Psychological background

 

 

Fluency

 

According to Winkielman (2003), when fluency is considered as “a cue to cognitive progress” it is likely to trigger an affective response, since it gives a feedback about the ongoing cognitive operations. When a process is fast, easy and coherent, it is said to be a “highly fluent processing”. It gives clues about a progress towards “successful recognition and interpretation of the target” (Carver & Scheier, 1990; Vallacher & Nowak, 1999). Again, according to Winkielman (2003), when this progress ends up with a reward, it will help “bringing the cognitive activity to completion”. If we consider applying the theory of the fluency as a cue to cognitive process to the perception of trailers and teasers, we may understand in a better way how the movie audience process trailers. Indeed, the process ending up with a reward may be considered as the person liking the movie trailer and thus, bringing the cognitive activity to completion by buying the movie ticket. Trailers might also be considered easy to process and to understand since, regarding what has previously been said, they give the entire structure of the movie.

 

So, what is the impact of a trailer characteristics on purchase intentions? The relationship between stimuli characteristics and liking could be explained by the most famous theory of

Winkielman (2003): the hedonic marking of processing fluency theory. Affective responses to perceptual or conceptual stimuli are influenced by the fluency (how easily they are recognized) with which they are processed. When a stimulus is processed fluently, a hedonically marked fluency signal causes a positive affective reaction. On the opposite, a stimulus which is processed with difficulty will trigger a negative affective reaction. Going deeply into this concept of fluency, we will try to apply it to the literature on trailers. Indeed, we could consider that when people understand what is going on the movie thanks to the trailer, it means that it is processed fluently, so it will trigger a positive affective reaction: people will have a positive opinion about the movie, they will like it already from the trailer.

 

However, if a trailer, or more precisely a teaser is not easy to process because it does not tell the whole story, people might have a negative opinion of the movie. After a long research and an exchange with researchers such as Martin Storme about Fluency, thanks to the class he taught on the first semester (2013), we came to the conclusion that there was no validated scale to measure this topic. What researchers do in general in this domain is asking three questions, then compute an alpha and use this measure. That is why we may ask to our subjects during the experiment three questions that will be developed in the chapter about the tested hypothesis. Nevertheless, we may wonder if these positive or negative reaction about the movie trailer or teaser really have an influence on the purchase behavior. Indeed, a negative affective reaction may trigger curiosity, or simply the presence of a famous and likeable actor may change everything. That is why we will try to make a step forward into the psychological background by studying selective attention.

 

Selective Attention

 

Indeed, selective attention may help us understand how people deal with their emotions when seeing trailers as well as teasers and how it influences the purchase behaviors. It has already been assumed that emotional responses give a relevant feedback about objects and events. Indeed, a lot of actions are coming from a previous attention: when an information seems relevant, it will be processed in a better way than an information which seems not important: attention makes us select what to process in order to act (Fenske, 2006). That is why we can claim that attention and emotion are related: indeed, when a stimuli is considered to be “emotional”, such as a sad face, or an object having a sentimental value, the attention will be caught more easily, and the “peripheral information” will not be taken into account (Fenske & Eastwood, 2003). If we try to make a parallel with movie advertisement, we may notice that selective attention plays an important part in the perception of a movie.

 

It may come from different stimuli: for instance, it may be an actor that reminds us of another movie we loved, or the person with which we saw the movie, but it can also be something like “nomination for the Oscars” in any category, or just the name of the director that will make people go see the movie even if the story told in the movie does not correspond to their tastes. Trailers does play on emotions to get the attention of the audience, with an impressive voice-over, a well-chosen music, an enhancing of the main actors, and fast-shown sequences. Teasers actually “tease” the attention of the movie consumers and make them feel curious and excited about the movie. However, it must be taken into account that the relationship between emotions and attention is interdependent: it means that if a person is in a certain emotional state, such as happiness or sadness, his attention will be held in different ways, on different stimuli. People will thus have a different perception of the presented stimulus. That is why the order of the different trailers or teasers may have a role when they are played in the movie theater. Nevertheless, it would be a restrictive point of view to think about emotions being the only drivers of our actions. The purchase behavior is perhaps driven by other forces: are people willing to take a risk in buying a movie ticket if they are not sure to be properly entertained?

 

 

Economic Background

 

 

Risk aversion vs Risk loving, and the Dospert scale

 

 

In economics, risk aversion is a concept based on the analysis of consumer’s behaviors;

When they are facing uncertainty, what is it that they will do to reduce it. Pratt (1964) and Arrow (1965) have computed this concept into a mathematical formalization, using utility functions, in order to measure it and to prove that risk aversion was the reticence of a person to accept a gamble with an uncertain but high payment, rather than another proposed gamble having a lower payment, but being more certain. It was also the point of view of Kahneman and Tversky (1979), who wrote that the preference for a certain outcome over a gamble or a deal with higher or equal expected value is considered as risk aversion.

 

On the opposite, they also define a risk loving behavior such as the rejection of a sure thing in favor of a gamble or a deal of lower or equal expected value. We may consider the concept of risk when paying to see a movie. Indeed, when people watch a trailer which reveals everything about the structure of a movie, they know what to expect when buying their tickets, and they thus do not take any risk of disliking the movie; they are risk-averse since they want to make sure of what they are going to pay for. Conversely, people who decide to pay to go see a movie without seeing the trailer or with seeing the teaser only will obviously take a risk by buying their tickets: they might not like the movie. They can be considered as risk-lover. We may thus consider testing the behaviors towards risk in our experiment through the Dospert scale, in order to explain purchasing behaviors towards movie tickets. According to Weber, Blais, and Batz (2002), the Dospert scale is a psychometric scale assessing risk taking in five domains: financial decisions, health/safety, recreational, ethical, and social decisions, such as : “Respondents rate the likelihood that they would engage in domain-specific risky activities.” The authors evaluated the scale’s construct validity and consistency and found as it was expected that the degree of risk taking was domain-specific, it revealed the existing differences in terms of risk taking across all content domains.

 

That is why, depending on the research topic, one may select some of the five tested domains. In order to test the risk aversion and risk taking behaviors of the subjects deciding whether they would take a risk by buying a ticket for a movie they do not know the plot of, or not taking a risk by buying a ticket for a movie they know the entire structure already, I choose to make them fulfill a questionnaire coming from two domain-contents of the scale corresponding to the tested purchase behavior, known as “recreational” and “social”. The items may be found in Annex 1.

 

The Willingness to pay

 

 

In order to define the willingness to pay (WTP) of an individual, we shall first define the willingness to accept (WTA), which is different, so there is no misunderstanding. The WTA would thus be the minimum amount a person is willing to be paid to give up a good or to accept something he does not wish. On the opposite, the WTP is actually the maximum amount a person is willing to pay or exchange in order to receive a good or to avoid something he does not wish. The willingness to pay of consumers is considered as very important by marketers to actually set up their prices, and it has been widely studied in order not to make mistakes and to sell products on a large scale. The willingness to pay may be tested with different procedures, but we first decided to focus on one procedure only in order to run our experiment: the Vickrey auctions, a method which is applicable at the point of purchase and which also “provides an incentive compatible estimate of the willingness to pay derived from real transactions” (Hoffmann et al., 1993).

 

According to Wertenbroch and Skiera (2002), incentives which will actually reveal any willingness to pay may be found through Vickrey auctions: “Vickrey suggests that incentive compatibility is ensured if a given bid determines only whether the bidder has the right to buy the good that is auctioned off”. It takes place in a hidden way, with the purchase price being determined by the second highest bid. An auction subject will submit a bid containing how much he would be willing to pay (in a sealed envelope for instance). When the subject has the highest bid, he wins the auction. However, the subject has to pay the price of the second highest bid. Since they have to buy the good when their bid wins the auction, the subjects are thus given an incentive to reveal their actual valuation of products through this mechanism (Vickrey, 1961). Nevertheless, this kind of testing must be done within a real physical experiment which we were not lucky enough to have. That is why, even if the Vickrey auctions was the procedure first chosen, it was not done because of the way questions were administered: through the Internet, there is no way to actually set up real auctions, so we came up with another way, much more simple, to test the willingness to pay of movie consumers: after seeing the trailers and teasers, they have to decide how much they could pay to actually go watch the movie in a movie theater, between zero and ten euros.

 

According to Breidert and al. (2006) classification framework of the willingness to pay measurement, this way is called measuring the stated preferences in a direct survey of a customer panel. Indeed, in direct surveys, customers are asked to state how much they would be willing to pay for some product, which is why preference data derived from surveys are referred to as stated preferences (Louviere et al., 2000) and not revealed preferences. With this simple and direct method, there is no bias of setting a price first, or acting on the supply, or competition with others, which could influence the participant’s answer; it is the consumer opinion only that matters. It is the most time-efficient and cost-effective method, which gives the best individual level-estimation among the other methods, according to the comparative evaluation of competing methods for measuring willingness to pay led by Breidert and al.

 

 

 

Hypothesis and Experiment about the differences between trailers and teasers

 

 

 

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