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Marvel Comics and Marvel S Turnaround

Decent Essays

Marvel Enterprises, Inc.
(b) Why was Marvel’s turnaround so successful? Would you characterize that success as a fluke? Or do you view it as sustainable? Why? How? Marvel’s success is definitely not a fluke and its business model is very sustainable. Because Marvel’s new strategy chose to monetize the content library via licensing characters for use with media products. In an era during which mass media is so important in people’s life, only one media tool - publishing is not strong enough to expand Marvel’s influence to consumers. Comic books can only target a very limited market that most is composed of male teenagers and young adults from 13 to 23 years old. It is very difficult to expand this traditional market significantly. …show more content…

In the past, toy business is just an annex to publishing industry. Not many efforts were invested in toys, even not mentioning strategic plans. Now toy industry is the second profit maker in Marvel, generating over $20 billion in sales in 2003. The toy business is very promising in the future. However its percentage in revenue will still keep stable or slightly decrease as publishing will do, because licensing has such a strong force to grow, while toy industry competition is too fierce to make further achievements.
(d) To what extent is Marvel’s success due to only one character, Spider-Man? How can Marvel develop its lesser-known characters? There is no doubt that, to some extent, Marvel’s success is due to Spider-Man since 1960s. However, the company still fell over in 1990s with such a successful superhero. Exploiting marketing strategies stretched out consumers’ interest. The Marvel’s new CEO, Peter Cuneo, restarted the company with negative assets, and turned the company around. Spider-Man resuscitated in comic-book publishing. In the Publishing Division, Marvel’s 64.65% revenue is from Spider-Man in the second half year of 2003 (See Appendix A Figure 1). In the movie box office revenue, Spider-Man collected 33.75% revenue in the US market and 37.23% in the world market, ranking the highest in Marvel movies (See Appendix A Figure 2). Spider-Man

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