Binge marketing: The best scenario for building your brand

On the 17 November 2021, the CIM Marketing Club hosted the third webinar this academic year for students interested in knowing more about the newest marketing trends and broadening their exposure towards the Marketing or Business industry.

The webinar was about Binge Marketing, which is about how marketers can apply the techniques and tactics the creators of films and series use to tell their stories and build their audience. The webinar guest speaker was Carlijn Postma, a brand strategist, Founder of The Post (a leading agency in content marketing) and Author of Binge Marketing, the Hollywood way to content marketing.

The content of the session was threefold. Firstly, it introduced how brands could translate their brand story into the scenario of a great television series where every piece of content is an episode of the same series. Secondly, the session allowed students to understand and work with the difference between a target group and an audience. Lastly, it introduced the audience journey (what content is relevant to the target audience at what point in the journey), hence get inspired.

Binge Marketing is a refreshing and unique way of creating marketing content. Nowadays, people are addicted to consuming TV shows through different streaming platforms like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime as the cliff-hanger content of each episode compels people to continue watching. The idea of Binge Marketing that Postma shared is that marketers should be like a TV showrunner – the person responsible for creating each episode - producing creative content that retains the audience. Postma explained how to use this methodology to tell a brand’s story like an entertaining  TV series. Not only can it raise people’s curiosity about the next episode, but it can also help brands to develop loyal and returning audiences or even attract more potential audiences.

Postma said the audience is different from a target group. An audience defines itself; they want to consume your content, while a target group is defined by marketers. Binge Marketing aims to build a long-term relationship with audiences and stimulate their interest in a brand’s products or services through serial content based on shared interests of your audience and brands, so it is vital to create a storyline that the audience can relate to.

Postma found similarities between the Hollywood hero’s journey and the audience’s journey. She gave insights into what content is relevant to your audience in which stages of the journey may help marketers retain the audience’s attention during the show.

To sum up, during the webinar, Postma shared her insights on Binge Marketing and explained this new methodology with some relatable examples. It was an eye-opening and beneficial webinar for marketing students because not many students were familiar with this topic. In this ever-changing world, it is believed that Binge Marketing will become more popular to use in marketing for brands in the future, and there should be more possibilities to discover.

If you are a university student and want to know more about the CIM Marketing Club, access future and past webinars and sign-up for regular Club updates then visit the Club webpage at Marketing Club | CIM

Wan Lee (Norwich Business School, UEA)