Marketing Goes to the Movies: Coma
It may seem that I’ve been watching a lot of creepy movies lately, but I haven’t really morphed into the the Crypt Keeper; I’m just behind on my scheduled Halloween film viewing. Too bad none of my selections featured a marauding killer turkey — I’d be ready to celebrate Thanksgiving early.
The movie I just watched is the 1978 thriller Coma, directed by Michael Crichton from the novel by medical-suspense writer Robin Cook. In it, a doctor (Genevieve Bujold) suspects that her hospital is artificially inducing permanent brain death in certain patients for some mysterious purpose. She learns that these patients are being transferred to a place called the Jefferson Institute, so she decides to pay a visit and snoop further.
Bujold joins a medical tour group as a nurse leads them through the Institute. The first stop is a very ordinary-looking room with a couple of beds, the usual electronic monitors, cheery wallpaper, and warm lighting. The nurse explains that the coma victims are relocated here temporarily for loved ones’ visits because the real patient area would be “too much of a shock” for the visitors. And shocking it is — a gigantic room filled with unconscious human beings suspended from the ceiling at varying heights, horizontally, on long wires. It’s an eerie visual impression, somewhere between a morgue and a meat locker.
But the impression is false, says the nurse. The patients in this room receive state-of-the-art care and monitoring, despite the inhuman appearances — better care, in fact, than they’d receive in that charming little “traditional” hospital room.
The difference? Tone. Regardless of what’s actually best for the patients, the visitors need to see a comforting, homey environment, because that’s the tone they respond positively to.
And yes, that is our marketing moral for the day — tone matters. Whatever we’re presenting to our audience, the tone we set must be:
Professionally appropriate. We can’t sell a children’s hospital with a bunch of tech talk, and we can’t sell a high-tech engineering firm with clowns and balloons.
Emotionally appealing. What does your audience want to feel as a result of your product or service? Relief? Joy? Peace? Enthusiasm?
Vividly presented. Good marketing captures the imagination. Images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings — these sense-memories are your tools for evoking strong, specific emotions in your audience.
So much for tone. In fact, now that my Halloween viewing queue in empty, I could use a change of tone myself. So break out the clowns and balloons….
