The Impact Of Media Coverage And Consumer Engagement On Box Office

The advent of new media,such as Twitter,Facebook,Weibo and We Chat has offered the movie industry new opportunities and increase sales.A better understanding of how these online activities on different media platforms impact the box office will benefit the movie industry.We collected daily data of 133 movies released in China in2017,including box office,the number of online news,social media posts,online search and reading,etc.By applying the panel vector auto-regression method,we investigated the dynamic impacts of media coverage and consumer engagement on the movie sales and examined how the influence is different between the original movies and IP(Intellectual Property,product with intellectual property rights)movies.We found that media coverage played a dominant role in explaining the box office of original movies,while consumer engagement was a major factor for the box office of IP movies.Specifically,media coverage and reading had a significant positive influence on box office of original movies and IP movies,but searching was not a significant predictor of original movies.Searching is not always a predictor of movie sales and consumers’ search intensity for a product is likely influenced by their perception of the movies’ quality uncertainty because they want to reduce the consumption risk through seeking more information.Compared with IP movies,media coverage played a greater role in promoting original movies,with a faster impact speed and a longer duration.In addition,online media coverage and consumer engagement also had mutual effects on each other.Specifically,media coverage and reading led to higher searching.Online news improved sequels’ sales through increased consumer engagement,and online news had a greater impact on consumer engagement than social media posts.In addition,we found that news can promote the number of articles pushed on social media platforms.This study suggests that managers should apply different channel strategies and allocate different resources for original movies and IP movies,and adjust strategies according to the market effectiveness of online marketing activities and consumer response.