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The growing interest of the scientific community in film marketing research can be discovered by the large scale published writings on the subject. Although, in this field, comprehensive and systematic research is still lacking. The important aim of this article is to merge the latest research results of film marketing through bibliometric research on articles published from 1976 to 2020, and to examine and introduce the research outcome from the view of the growth trend of the field; the most productive and influential countries, authors, articles, institutions, and research journals; keywords, author patterns, and international linkages. Research outcomes show that film marketing research increased gradually from 1976 to 2020, especially in the last five to 10 years. During this period, all 500 scholarly articles were published in 331 journals and listed in Scopus. Comparison is drawn between institutions from developing countries (in terms of number of articles) and developed countries (in terms of citation rate). On the basis of key points and three-factor examination, a conclusion is drawn that in the last 10 years, ‘film marketing’ as a keyword has attracted widespread attention.

The purpose of this paper is to understand and identify the marketing strategies and specific promotional tools used by film commissions to attract the production of films and television.

The paper involves in‐depth interviews with film commissions worldwide and a content analysis of their promotional materials.

Film commissions employ three key strategic marketing approaches when promoting their locations to film producers – product differentiation, service differentiation, and cost advantages. They use six main specific promotional tactics – advertising, sales promotions, joint promotions, public relations, online marketing, and direct marketing and personal selling. A model explaining the relationship between film commissions and film producers involving these strategies and promotional tools is suggested.

The marketing of film locations is under‐researched and has to be further addressed in the marketing literature. Future research can seek to identify the specific marketing activities that will lead to success for the marketing of film locations.

Examples of the best marketing practices amongst film commissions are highlighted.

This is an original contribution in that it is the first academic paper to address the marketing of film locations. It will be of significant value to film locations seeking to attract production to their locations.

This paper seeks to explore a host of straight‐to‐DVD and direct‐download motion picture marketing, production, and distribution strategies deployed by Florida‐based Maverick Entertainment. The focus is Maverick's most prominent and successful sub‐genre “urban teen gangsta” films.

The somewhat wide‐ranging and eclectic approach taken in this paper draws from two emergent academic subdisciplines: consumer culture theory (CCT), largely on the business‐school side, and media industry studies (MIS), largely on the communications‐school side. The project thus attempts to bridge the interpretive poetics and eclecticism of CCT with the interpretive aesthetics and eclecticism of MIS and relies on a blend of filmic, marketing, PR, journalistic, trade publication, and academic evidence.

It is argued that “marketing mimicry” – where Maverick imitates specific successful urban‐teen themed cross‐over film marketing strategies of major and mini‐major Hollywood studio titles – was crucial to the start‐up's success.

Marketers outside the USA will find it somewhat difficult to glean generalizable lessons based on the strategies and principles evaluated here. Future research should be conducted in the area of direct‐download of urban teen filmed content, particularly vis‐à‐vis Maverick's new direct‐download partners such as Hulu, YouTube, Amazon VOD, Facebook Store, and Gigaplex. Future research should also look into the extent to which the somewhat pervasive notion of a “global teen audience” is valid for this sub‐genre of films.

Marketers are advised to thin‐slice the appeals of their teen‐themed product‐lines to maximize the appeal to given sub‐segments. Marketers may beneifit by developing ethical non‐harmful iterations of marketing‐mimicry in their market space.

Scholars who analyze teen‐themed marketing strategies often tend to construct some version of the “global teenager”. The current paper focuses largely on African American and Latino American teens.

This is the first paper to analyse how a small firm successfully markets to the urban American teen film audience. It is also the first academic paper to explore the concept of marketing‐mimicry.

This paper aims to explain a celebrity’s deep resonance with consumers by unpacking the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning, the authors conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal.

Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis.

In rehumanising the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as the performer, the private person behind the public performer, the tangible manifestation of either through products and the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires, the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity.

Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers.

The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices.

While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer.

This paper aims to contribute to the development of a film brand theory and in doing so, illustrate the utility of a socio‐cultural approach to branding. The purpose is to develop the conceptual framework within which the film brandscape may be considered. An illustrative case study of the James Bond franchise is provided so that the potential application of the framework can be clearly understood.

The paper approaches the topic from a socio‐cultural perspective in order to take particular account of the symbolic nature of film offerings. It combines insights from contemporary production and consumption practices in the film industry with theoretical perspectives from marketing, branding, consumer, cultural and film studies. Although a conceptual paper, it incorporates an illustrative case, the James Bond franchise, in order to support the proposed brandscape.

Films are marked with signs of ownership and may carry other cues which function as risk‐reducing shorthand devices. Consumers look to brand characteristics as communicated through brand cues. Particular brandscapes can be viewed as loosely bounded sites within which meaning is derived from making sense of the various, interrelated brands within this brandscape. Such meaning is dependent on cultural cues which evolve over time.

This paper presents a theory of film branding which is primarily applicable to mainstream commercial films. The implications for marketing and branding scholars are highlighting the need to view brands within their wider brandscapes in order to understand how consumers understand brands in relation to one another. There is also a need to move beyond dominant relational modes of thinking about brands and consumers to consider the temporal nature of brand meanings.

The paper offers a theoretical approach enabling scholars in a range of disciplines to engage in cross‐disciplinary dialogue about film brands, thus facilitating debate and opening up new lines of research inquiry. The case study included is merely illustrative and further empirical studies are needed to test and develop the brandscape.

The paper develops the cultural approach to branding through introducing the idea of the granularity of the brandscape: particular brandscapes can be viewed as loosely bounded sites within which meaning is derived from making sense of the various, interrelated brands within this brandscape. Such meaning is dependent on cultural cues which evolve over time. Managerial decision making can be understood through considering the various cast and crew decisions, genre and positioning. Through understanding the granularity of the brandscape, marketing and branding practitioners can have a greater understanding of consumer sensemaking which can be used in strategic decision making.

This study aims to test the utility of Pearce et al.'s (2003) framework on film tourism in Otaru, Japan. This framework involves marketing the attraction according to five stages: resource identification, marketing emphasis, interpretation, sales and merchandising and broader community use. The existing studies have failed to adapt this framework to films. Subsequently, this study uncovers the necessity of an additional stage involving sustainability aspects.

A case study method was adopted, and Otaru, Japan – a popular film location – was chosen. Semi-structured interviews with the major stakeholders of film tourism, such as film commissions, representatives of the film and the tourism industries, tourists and the community, were conducted, and the participants were observed. Data were collected using the snowball sampling technique.

The study reveals that Pearce et al.'s (2003) model is applicable to film tourism by adding a sixth stage to address sustainability, such as the issue of overtourism.

The transferability of the framework to different film tourism cases is plausible. It is also critical for governments and tourism practitioners to consider the community's perspective for sustainability and maximize the use of films as promotional tools for destinations.

This study is the first to apply Pearce et al.'s (2003) model to film tourism, adding value to the literature by extending the framework to include an additional sixth stage to address sustainability.

Building strong human brands inscribed in social and symbolic recognition is a strategic issue for branded individuals. In the context of film director human brands, this study aims to examine the respective influences of the economic and critical performance of films, on the one hand, and the professional legitimacy bestowed by internal stakeholders, on the other, on changes in human brand identity. Contrary to what is generally believed, it shows that the specific legitimacy bestowed by producers and the institutional legitimacy bestowed by elite peers mediate the effects of performance on changes in human brand identity. Brand extension (i.e. new films) incongruence and initial human brand identity moderate the effect of performance on legitimacy.

This study is applied to film director human brands and to their extensions through the films they make. Data were collected for 81 films, including information before and after the brand extension occurs, to capture changes in human brand identity and extension effects.

The results show that economic performance influences both specific and institutional legitimacy, whereas critical performance only impacts institutional legitimacy. These relationships are moderated by initial human brand identity and congruence. Both types of professional legitimacies also help reinforce human brand identity.

The study challenges the role of performance on the building of human brand identity and shows that the latter is co-constructed by the branded individual and internal stakeholders. It also enhances the key roles of global incongruence and genre incongruence in the model.

Employing the Star Wars brand as a case study, this paper seeks to critically discuss the importance of comparative mythology for inter-generational branding and consumption practices within arts related markets.

Secondary data have been gathered focusing on the analysis of material in the form of books, academic journals, films, videos, television programs, websites and media reports related to the interface between comparative mythology, the Star Wars brand.

First, this paper indicates how the long-standing success of the Star Wars brand mirrors and reflects the power of monomythic storytelling in creating a platform for arts and place building branding associations and extensions for numerous products and services. Second, this study shows and highlights the potential of monomythic structures/storytelling and comparative mythology in acting an underlying cultural platform whereupon several arts brand associations, narratives, extensions and overall strategies can emerge. Finally, this project suggests how arts marketing scholars could further explore the infusion of mythological narratives within branding practices in the areas of performing/visual arts, museums, entertainment and arts related tourism campaigns.

Focusing on the most successful film franchise of all times, this study argues that comparative mythology constitutes an endless source for common templates of artistic, cross-cultural and inter-generational marketing practices focusing on universal moral codes and archetypes.

The purpose of this paper is to show how an increasing number of film and tourism industry stakeholders are working together with the dual goals of attracting film production and then capitalizing on the subsequent exposure.

Recently published reports and articles related to the film industry and film tourism in particular are thoroughly reviewed.

Although most tourism organizations and film commissions have been slow to tap the potential benefits of film tourism, the examples highlighted show how partnerships between the two industries can be mutually beneficial.

If leveraged well, film tourism can have large economic gains for countries and regions. Destination marketing organizations should be working with film commissions and engaging in marketing activities at four distinct stages of a film's lifecycle; before production of a film, during production, during release of the film, and after release.

This is the first full film tourism paper to reflect on existing collaboration between the film and tourism industries.

This paper aims to identify the effects of social learning and network externalities by conditioning on product quality and early sales momentum. This approach is demonstrated using film sales data.

This study used econometric modeling approach.

It was found that both social learning and network externalities have significant and comparable impacts on film choice. We show that the relative effects of network externalities and social learning in the film market are robust to different momentum and quality definitions and to alternative estimation methods.

Scholars have long argued that social learning plays a key role in new product diffusion. In some product categories, consumer choice may also be influenced by network externalities, meaning that purchasing popular products may provide the consumer utility above and beyond that derived from product usage directly. We propose a novel identification approach to help quantify the relative magnitude of these two effects on new product sales.