Beowulf Style Marketing
Beowulf is a marketer’s dream come true. Or a nightmare.
I’m not sure which.
First off, you have a classic product being re-released in new clothes.
Or lack thereof, in the case of the Angelina Jolie inspired avatar and quite often the image inspired by, but not fleshed out enough to be, Ray Winstone and too fleshed out in the case of Anthony Hopkins’ King Hrothgar.
Let’s start with a perfectly fine product, the original Beowulf. I never read it, so it must have been too deep for my shallow little mind.
A fourteen hundred year-old poem brought up to standard with 2007’s technology is much more suited for me than a dusty old book.
Too bad the technology chosen was not as viewable as say, ‘300′ was, in my opinion.
But that’s where the marketing comes in.
You have a cartoonish technology that’s a bit better than your usual Scooby Doo cartoons of my childhood, but still inferior to the CGI used for ‘300′.
What do you do to attract prospects ?
What do you do to turn those prospects into paying customers ?
Duh ! Do what works, of course. Use a naked avatar of Angelina Jolie and make sure it’s got more meat on it than the actual prototype does.
I’ve seen the covers of People magazine waiting in line at the grocery store. And I’ve seen Beowulf.
The avatar is fleshed out WAY, WAY better than the prototype. The actual Angelina could take some hints from the movies and get rid of some of those bones that stick out at odd angles and those veins that are too close to the surface from the lack of meat on said bones.
The next bit of marketing genius is to take your hero, who has no thought of going the Spartan and steroid route and give him a six pack-o-abs thru the wonders of cartoons and animation.
The fact that they never showed him in full regalia gives more creedence to the steroid accusation. Even does it’s dirty deed to cartoon figures, I guess.
Beowulf has another, more important, quality to him that we as marketers need to be aware of.
He never missed a chance to expand upon his legend, his product, it’s brand, it’s uses and it’s features. He was a copywriter’s dream come tru and a bullet point per minute kind of guy.
As a marketer, I loved the dude.
As a matter of fact, he was the ultimate PR guy from start to finish.
Write it down - Never miss a chance to tell the world how good your product is.
Never be scared to build it’s reputation to the fullest and shout it’s effectiveness at the top of your lungs.
If you don’t, nobody will do it for you. Unless you happen to hang out with your own team of citizen evangelists, here called his crew.
And if you can enlist a naked Angelina Jolie to help you promote it, you might have a product fit for a King or maybe, if you live long enough to say what you should have said a long time ago…a Queen.
Beowulf - Gotta love his marketing team and the movie’s good too.
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