RMM

This is the second in a series of posts looking at people’s decision making behaviours regarding cinema visits in the age of social media, compared with our behaviours ten years ago. You can read the first post in this series here.

I would like to start off by thanking everyone who took my survey. I shall now reveal the findings, as well as my personal hypothesis as promised.

Reminiscing on my own actions in the past, I concluded decision making used to follow a fairly linear pattern - people would find out about a new film through information source X, decide whether it is worth seeing, go and see it if it is, and sometimes recommend it to friends. I believe Web 2.0 has changed things significantly - after becoming aware of a new film people will most likely go online, judge sentiment trends toward a film and make their decision accordingly. Having seen the film, users can feed back their experience and add to the film’s buzz. This creates a non-linear system of constantly changing, extremely subjective conversations which can easily alter users’ expectations. So, how right was I?

Well, partially. Surprisingly, the majority of you replied that they used to first consult friends before seeing a film and only 17% would go and see it directly. This suggests there was appetite for word of mouth information dissemination even 10 years ago. Thinking of today, results indicated that I was wrong about post-experience actions - 49% said they were more likely to recommend the movie in real life compared to just 16% who rate the films online and the same score use Facebook to share with friends.

Comparing the past with today, the most likely primary sources of information remain friends in real life followed by advertising and marketing campaigns the power of which has evidently grown - 68% claimed this is how they are likely to find out about new films today vs. 54% 10 years ago. Newspapers and magazines were the third most informative source for the past, but with time are pushed out by film review websites, Facebook and YouTube.

On the topic of influence, traditional media have clearly lost their power which dropped from significant 10 years ago to neutral today. Friends in real life remain the most influential sources and review websites, blogs and Youtube tend to score the highest on the social media list. Facebook falls in the neutral category and Twitter scores high on insignificant to very insignificant influence.

The top preferred factors for review websites were official critics’ reviews, overall information availability, size of movie database and credibility factors suggested subjective information is fine as long as it is coupled with expertise and variety of content.

How does all this link together and leverage decision-makers? It is clear that habits have changed with the increase of information sources and emergence of online communities, so the question remains who, where, when and how to target both in terms of audience and social media channels in order to push and popularize film content. My final post will reveal more precise guidelines on doing this by exploring the emerging patterns of attitudes and decision-making habits, numbers left out this time.