The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – a marketing dream
Marketing a fictional female icon with The Feel Bad Xmas Movie strapline
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an amazing and gripping story and it’s about to be unleashed on the world as a Hollywood film with the great strapline of The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas!
It is indeed a very bloody and violent story and you can understand the publishers changing the title from the original “Men Who Hate Women” to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. Much more marketable across the world.
The irony of the incredible success of “The Girl…” and it’s trilogy counterparts “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and the finale “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest” is that the visionary author Stig Larsson saw none of it’s phenomenal success. He never even intended the books to be published.
Larsson had written them for his own pleasure after returning home from his job in the evening, and had made no attempt to get them published until shortly before his death. Staggering considering that they have now sold 30 million copies gloablly. He was the 2nd most read author in 2008 and The Hornet’s Nest was the most sold book in the US in 2010.
Darker marketing poster still....
The heroine, Lisbeth Salander (played by Rooney Mara in the new film), is a dream to market, something edgy, something cool. The new film is sure to unleash a million copycats inspired for her dark look, piercings and of course tattoos as well as her single mindedness, care free attitude to life and sex, tech savvyness, strong feminine role model values, deadly seriousness when it came to work and getting results against all odds and values of vengeance and knowing what is right.
Lisbeth is actually based on a real girl who Larsson saw being gang raped and did nothing to intervene and never forgave himself and wrote the stories in tribute to her and to highlight Sweden’s crime rate against women (the book is full of stats about how Swedish men get away with violence against Swedish women). It does an amazing job in creating awareness and it would have been great to have created a marketing partnership with a female anti-violence/female violence awareness charity not just in Sweden but in every country the film was being played. Too serious? Why not? It’s a serious subject that the book/ film raises graphically many times.
Lisbeth wears some very cool t-shirts which the producers should market as they would go down a stom. “Consider this a fair warning”, “I can be a regular bitch.Just try me”, “Armageddon was yesterday – today we have a serious problem” and “I am also an alien” are just some of the many straplines she uses to embody her brand. Although there is the odd DIY t-shirt on sale on line (The Armageddon one appears to be popular!) and there are t-shirts with “Lisbeth Salander is my hero” there is no complete range of them to capitalise on with the new film, a missed opportunity there too.
Daniel Craig plays the journalist Mikael Blomkvist which will be compared to the original film, in Swedish, which became one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed foreign films ever.
The new film has been marketed very easily tapping into the huge well of positivity from the books and initial films and great talk-abaility about the book. They can hardly fail given the huge numbers that the book has sold. There have been various creative posters promoting the film depending on where you live which is interesting to see the difference between Sweden where the book is based and author lived and the US in the way the film is being marketed.
