Saving a failing product
A couple of days ago a friend of mine called about a meeting, he knew about my interest in the marketing field, so he decided to share an interesting move they put on table while trying to save one of their failing products. While on phone, he made me excited about the story he wanted to share, so we set up a meeting.
This guy is working for a local TV channel (he asked me not to name it, though it’s one of the biggest in the country, but nothing fancy in comparison to those from outside), which sometimes produces TV shows. His role/title is meaningless for this article, what matters is that he was able to bring me the story, more exactly to confirm it. That’s right, little he knew when he called me. Since I am following some of the local TV channels I noticed a TV show (and many others) that was pretty bad in my opinion and I didn’t understand what was it doing on the screen. One day before his call, I caught on the same TV channel some “NEWS” about the TV show in talks, more exactly about an event where the fans met the actors. In the news it was stated that thousands of fans were around for more than 8 hours where the actors dedicated posters and took photos with them. This statement seemed weird to me because based on the videos the event took place in a not too large hall and there were maybe 100 people around (including those from outside, visible through the windows). Though, they were talking about 8 hours, which can easily make up to thousands of people. Anyways, to me it seemed like a scam, especially by regarding the TV show itself, I thought it’s “fake news”, as someone we all know loves to say… Honestly I didn’t pay much attention to this until I got the call.
When we’ve met I asked him if isn’t the story about TV show “X”, he was like “wow”. Though I was pretty wrong about the story itself, the show was performing worse then I thought. He told me that they got an amazing number of viewers when the TV show first aired (thanks to the great marketing effort), but on the 3rd episode the number of viewers dropped by 21% which is huge. Till it reached the 19th episode it dropped by 4 more percent. Then the “fake news” came up, he told me that there were only around 400 people at the event and actors stood for around 6 hours, but fans weren’t around for that much.
By the time of writing this article he confirmed that the 20th episode, which aired after our meeting, got an increase in number of viewers by 11%. More than that, the older episodes got massive hits on the TV channel’s online platform. Now the thing is that the season ended in a quite different style than it kicked off. The last couple of episodes were pretty good (somehow) but if people don’t know about them it’s all meaningless. They managed to get back on the track right on the edge and now they’re planning season 2.
The point of this article is to show you that you don’t have to drop a product only because it’s on the failing road, there are chances that it can be saved super easily, example: by picturing it to the public as a success. Obviously, it isn’t that easy in most of the cases.