What Drives Us to Tintin
If the motion picture industry is a winner-takes-all market, i.e. a very risky market with strong inequalities in the distribution of market shares, the culprit is to be found in the susceptibility of moviegoers to social influence. And the main expression of social influence isn't the imitation effect (the desire to watch a movie that other people have watched) but the coordinated consumption effect (the willingness to watch a movie with other people that have not watched it yet but are likely to), Sebastiano Delre (Department of Marketing), Thijs Broekhuizen (University of Groningen) and Anna Torres (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) find out in Simulating the Cinema Market: How Cross-Cultural Differences in Social Influence Explain Box Office Distributions (Journal of Product Innovation Management, Volume 28, Issue 2, pages 204-217, March 2011, doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5885.2011.00792.x).
Delre and his colleagues first design an agent-based model which simulates the cinema market and predicts social influence as the main driver of market inequalities, then they empirically validate their model via cross-national data showing, as expected from the model, that the cinema markets of countries with a higher degree of social influence are significantly more concentrated.
While the majority of studies focus on social influence resulting from others' past behaviour, the three scholars include others' intentions in their model, showing that the effect of coordinated consumption is almost four times stronger than the effect of imitation.
The authors base their empirical validation on the results of a cross-cultural survey. Analyzing 1396 questionnaires collected in China, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, the scholars verify that Chinese and Dutch consumers are more prone to social influence than Spaniards and Italians and that the Chinese and Dutch cinema markets are more concentrated than the other two.
The findings provide useful insights regarding the launch of new movies in multiple countries. The common Hollywood advertising strategy, widely used in all countries, suggests spending the best part of the advertising budget before the movie is launched. This makes sense in collective countries because it may convince the audience that others will approve their actions. However, the same strategy may not be optimal for individualistic countries where moviegoers base their choices on the fit between the product image and the image of the individual self and can be more prone to imitation effects following quality indicators such as awards, positive reviews and debates.