Updated: Aug 24, 2022

By Philippe Guinaudeau, CEO

You work as a product manager for a sizable consumer goods company, and you have been given the challenging duty of forecasting how well your items will perform over the forthcoming holiday season. The stakes are high: if your forecasts are off and you don’t reach your sales targets, you’ll lose your job.

There’s no denying that your team made the right decision to include entertainment licensing as a significant part of their marketing plan, but you have so many questions:

• Which characters should they highlight?
• Which characters are most likely to be liked by the consumers?
• Can character fans serve as a proxies for brand awareness?
• How are they different from other brand awareness metrics?
• How do they impact consumer decision-making?
• Is there an optimum count of characters that can appeal to all types of consumers without diluting brand equity?
• Should companies benefit from more licenses if they draw a different demographic of consumers than the ones they already have in their portfolio?
• …

The answers can be found in the data that your team has already gathered over the past few months, including BrandTrends’ consumer preference surveys of thousands of consumers of entertainment-related brands and content. You can leverage this information to predict how well your products will perform in the market by using our analytics techniques. Let me elaborate…

Entertainingly, our findings imply that the performance of consumer product sales can be predicted using entertainment licensing (a good predictor of sales). We use a new metric of character fan preference, the Brand Popularity Index (our own exclusive composite index), which predicts how fans of licensed characters will convert into purchasers of those consumer products. See the chart below:

In very short words, you can assess the number of potential purchasers. Additionally, you can estimate the frequency of purchases and the amount spent if you wish to push the assumptions even further. This is sizing the opportunity!

Entertainment licenses are the subject of a lot of buzz and enthusiasm, but we want to lay out the realities. The truth is that entertainment licensing provides many benefits for organizations looking to create new brands and/or expand into new markets. Before making any decisions, companies intending to enter this market should be informed of what they’re getting into. That’s where BrandTrends will help!