7 Star Wars Marketing Lessons To Help You Use The Force

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Let’s Review 7 Star Wars Marketing Lessons, and dig into the success and what we can do for our own marketing efforts.

Star Wars has become one of the biggest box office successes of all time. The franchise is amazing. The story is original. It’s created a complete and intricate universe that fans have come to love and want more of.

How to become a Jedi in marketing

The Force behind Star Wars isn’t just composed of great original content. Its also composed of some hyper-successful marketing efforts. Let’s break down all of these Star Wars Marketing Lessons:

1. Provoking the right types of emotion

Customers often make decisions based on emotions. In fact, per a Harvard professor, 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious and based on emotion.

When creating a good story or product, you need to be thinking about the emotions that you want to convey. The emotional experience bonds your audience with your product. And if you accomplish a better connection than others, that’s where you will stand out.

Star Wars has created a huge fan base since the beginning. The amount of emotional connection with the beginning three movies hit home in a big way.

Even without a large budget, your brand or products can still generate a loyal customer base. Do it by creating a product or content that provokes emotion in your customer base. This will make them feel a certain way about your business. And you can build it up from there.

Consider making an entire branding campaign into a celebration or event.  Star Wars has the famous “May the Forth Be With You” day for example. Give it a unique name and build anticipation with teasers or snippets of the real thing. In this way, you can turn a simple sale into something your customers look forward to.

2. the value of storytelling

A huge Star Wars Marketing Lesson is that it teaches us the value of storytelling. A great story resonates with the fan base in other words. There is a necessity in developing a resonating story around your brand.

Some key storytelling points have hit home over and over to name a few:

• Fighting against all odds for what is right.
• Friendship. This is one of Star Wars’ top themes.
• Facing fear directly.
• A sense of humor. The Star Wars films would not be nearly as good without their humor.
• Hated and memorable villains.
• Learning lessons.

3. The benefit of having many types of content/products: be seemingly everywhere

At this point and in this day and age, there are many types of media channels for content/products. Movies, audiobooks, video games, apps, trading cards, and more. For the latest trilogy installment, the marketing team for Star Wars covered all types of content to reach the widest audience possible. As a result, Star Wars fans got more hyped up for the franchise again and again, while marketers could expand to new audiences by experimenting with content.

This goes along with the rule of 7 which you may have heard of in the marketing world. You need to hit a person with some form of ads, media, etc. at least 7 times before they take action. And in this day in age, we have more and more media channels and platforms to accomplish this.

Let’s start taking advantage of this and implementing it for our own means. We created a great product, now let’s get it promoted, everything, everywhere, all at once.

Here is a great video showing the depth of Star Wars Marketing, just for Episode I alone:

You will see in that video how big a deal merchandising is. And how it brings brands the biggest piece of the income pie. I go in-depth into the winner of this category which isn’t Star Wars. It’s Pokémon: Marketing Success Of Pokémon – The Top-grossing Media Franchise – Ever

This ties into and brings me to my next Star Wars Marketing Lesson:

4. Collaboration wins

Many brands have made large sums of money with Star Wars by infusing it into their own products and marketing it to gain more outreach. Such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Lego, Hot Wheels, Oreo, and more. Star Wars has been so well infused into our culture that attracts millions of fans, and brands can not stay out of the trend. Everyone likes the Force.

This is part of the everywhere strategy as in the above. The more you can get your product promoted and become seemingly everywhere, the better you will be. Take Mcdonald’s and Starbucks as another example. They are everywhere. Sometimes just blocks away from another location they have. That strategy is not going away.

5. teasing

There have been hundreds of hours of promotional videos, behind-the-scenes footage, and documentaries that gave fans plenty of excitement and teasing before the films actually hit the theater.

The main Star Wars Marketing Lesson here is don’t just release your product. Tease hints that something big is coming so you can generate interest before the actual announcement.

6. It spans generations, in other words, they’ve had skin in the game

It’s cross-generational. Everyone has either heard of it, loves or hates it, etc. It’s just everywhere and dominates the movie industry.

Many fans had started watching the films as children. This was around the 1980s.  The success kept on passing on to their children, and now the next generation after them. Which makes Star Wars cross-generational. Even with the new movies and tv shows rolling out, generations of fans keep gathering for the love of the franchise.

That might not sound like very useful advice if you just started your business last week. But it’s something to think about for the future of your business. Get a great product created now, that then has the potential of growing into something big. Then gets recreated or continued into the next generation. Creating lifelong and beyond income for your business.

7. Dinsey was the link to its billion-dollar franchising

This one is mostly for perspective for scaling your business. This helps to look at the big picture.

Disney’s purchase of the “Star Wars” production company Lucasfilm is proving to be one of the smartest acquisitions ever made in America. Disney has already recouped its 2012 $4 billion Star Wars investment.

Talk about a successful business deal. This one Star Wars Marking Lesson alone, since Disney acquired the rights have already recouped their large investment.  Collaboration is the big winner here. Taking something that was already very successful, and implementing it with another successful company to take it to the moon.

May the Force of marketing be with you!

Star Wars is one of the most profitable movie franchises in the world. If you can get a great product/story created, make it known everywhere, collaborate, and tease your newer products, you will win.

And don’t worry. You can do all of those things gradually. Literally taking any of those steps will pay off. The sooner you do them the better your marketing efforts will pay off.

I hope you enjoyed this blog! Please feel free to check out our other blogs. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions and if this helped you at all in your marketing efforts, thank you!