The begining of a new chapter…brands positioning analysis

Hello everyone !

In the previous articles, Super Morgane and Wonder Elsa used their extraordinary powers to tell you more about strenghts and weaknesses, POPs and PODs, brand mantra and brand anatomy of Marvel and DC Comics.

Today we are going to tackle the second step of this brand audit : the exploratory part. This will help us to understand what consumers think and feel about the brands and if it matches with the supporting marketing program.

Reeeaaady for this new trip ? Let’s go !

To have a better idea of how consumers perceive Marvel and DC Comics, we conducted an online questionnaire among 19 respondents, male and female, from 22 to 29 years old.

A minority of them (16%) are regular comics readers, but they all know Marvel and DC Comics through movies, as they have seen the early productions from both brands :

Regarding the comics target, 84% of our respondents think it is composed of men from 20 to 30 years old for Marvel.

DC Comics books target is approximately the same, as 89% of the repondents answered it is composed of men and 74% of them think that they are from 20 to 30 years old.

To summarize, Marvel’s target market according to business segment is younger (13-23 years old) than the target percieved by consumers.

As DC Comics’ target market according to business segment is quite large (from 13 to 35 years old), it is harder to compare the results with the answers to our questionnaire.

Regarding the movies target, Marvel’s results are exactly the same as for the comics target (84% of people interviewed think it is composed of men from 20 to 30 years old).

For DC Comics, the results are almost the same to as 89% of them think it is composed of men and 79% of them think they are from 20 to 30 years old.

So, in the mind of consumers, the movies target is quite narrow, while for both brands, the movies are a way to attract a larger public than comic books.

Now, let’s have a look to the brands values :

In order to study consumers reactions and to see if they differentiate Marvel to DC Comics, I chose to mix the values of both brands and asked the respondents to choose the ones that best correspond to each brand.

Top 3 values for Marvel :

1-Entertainment

2-Family-friendly

3-Empowerment of all generations

Top 3 values for DC Comics :

1-Entertainment

2-Family-friendly

3-Quality

As you can see, the only thing that differenciates Marvel from DC Comics in consumers' mind is that they allow quality to DC Comics. We have to notice that the quality value is meant to be one of Marvel’s core values.

About the brands POPs and PODs, we wanted to study which elements really differienciate the two brands according to consumers. Respondents had the choice to pick up one or several answers to this question.

The two most recurrent answers show that the team stories are a key differenciation element for 42% of consumers, but also that 42% of them cannot differentiate the two brands. For these, maybe the result can be explained by the fact that the people interviewed are not hard fans of Marvel and DC Comics universes.

Regarding the brand mantra for both brands, it appears that employees describe Marvel as a"fun", "creative"and "friendly"work environment. About DC Comics, as the company belongs to Warner Bros, they tend to have the same brand mantra, which is described as "collegial" and "familial"; employees describe Warner Bros as their "home".

To sum up, consumers have difficulties to make the difference between Marvel and DC Comics.

They allow them almost the same target, which is pretty narrow, especially for movies (we would have expected they choose a large target for movies which are really popular). As a paradox, one of Marvel values according to them is « empowerement of all generations ». Plus, the « quality » value given to DC Comics is a really positive advantage that haven’t been raised before. Finally, team stories produced by Marvel proved their efficiency as they are the most important point of differenciation to the consumers.

By Bat Laurie-Anne

Sources :

http://www.google.com/forms/about/
http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Marvel-Entertainment/reviews
http://www.warnerbroscareers.com/professionals/