Unless you live in a cave, you know that new Star Wars movie has launched, and so with it the barrage of Star Wars stuff. The merchandising machine for this movie is nothing like I have ever seen before, especially before the movie debuted. It made Christmas shopping easy this year because everything was Star Wars themed. In my ventures through Target, I captured the enromity of the Star Wars machine – see pics below.
Star Wars Makes Sense with Disney
If all estimations are correct, products linked to the Star Wars could bring in as much as $5 billion in just the next year. Disney kicked up its marketing on Sept. 4 with Force Friday, an engineered shopping day pegged to the launch of a new line of Star Wars toys. It produced holiday-esque sales that up’d the ante of Amazon’s Prime Day and neared Black Friday levels, even without any deals. There were 15 million visits to websites selling Star Wars products between September and November.
That’s an crazy amount of money, but with the slate of goods and merchandise they have in the works, it also seems totally within their reach. As for the The Force Awakens movie itself, it could bring in as much as $615 million worldwide in just its first weekend of release. That would beat the current record holder, Jurassic World, which had the biggest global opening ever earlier this year on the way to earning more than $1.5 billion at the box office.
Update: As of 12/28/15 the movie has become the top grossing Star Wars film. Read the article here.
Perfect Storm Marketing
Three factors are at play —
- It’s been a decade sinceRevenge of the Sith, so there is a real thirst for a new, compelling Star Wars movie;
- It’s Christmas, arguably the busiest spending period of the entire year;
- Star Wars doesn’t have a specific target age group. Young children, older folks and anyone in between could very well have an interest in the film.
SO……Star Wars ice cream, Star Wars life-sized droids, Star Wars LEGO, Star Wars candy, Star Wars high heels and clothing, Star Wars makeup, Star Wars bathrobes, Star Wars luggage, even Star Wars oranges. Just a few days prior to the release of the long-awaited Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Dec. 18, society is in an all-out Star Wars fever. The craziness and absurd, which has been ramping up for months, has culminated in the perfect storm of marketing, an almost unstoppable strategy put forth by Disney.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is planning a Star Wars-themed “Epic Weekend” in 3,000 stores, offering shoppers the opportunity to play the Star Wars: Battlefront video game, made by Electronic Arts Inc., four days before it is available for purchase. It currently carries over 500 Star Wars items in stores and “thousands” online, a spokeswoman says.
Target Corp. has more than 600 Star Wars items in stores and more than 1,000 online, including action figures, pizza cutters and lipstick. Among its biggest sellers is BB-8, a robot about whom only hints have been revealed through Disney’s cryptic movie trailers.
Interesting Merchandise
Rejected Ideas
