When Kerry Met Sally: Politics and Perceptions in the Demand for Movies

Abstract

M ovie producers and exhibitors make various decisions requiring an understanding of moviegoer's preferences at the local level. Two examples of such decisions are exhibitors' allocation of screens to movies and producers' allocation of advertising across different regions of the country. This study presents a predictive model of local demand for movies with two unique features. First, arguing that consumers' political tendencies have an unutilized predictive power for marketing models, we allow consumers' heterogeneity to depend on their voting tendencies. Second, instead of relying on the commonly used genre classifications to characterize movies, we estimate latent movie attributes. These attributes are not determined a priori by industry professionals but rather reflect consumers' perceptions, as revealed by their moviegoing behavior. Box-office data over five years from 25 counties in the U.S. Midwest provide support for this model. First, consumers' preferences are related to their political tendencies. For example, we find that counties that voted for congressional Republicans prefer movies starring young, Caucasian, female actors over those starring African American, male actors. Second, perceived attributes provide new insights into consumers' preferences. For example, one of these attributes is the movie's degree of seriousness. Finally, and most importantly, the two improvements proposed here have a meaningful impact on forecasting error, decreasing it by 12.6%.

Better or Different? How Political Ideology Shapes Preferences for Differentiation in the Social Hierarchy

“…Finally, our findings contribute to emerging evidence on the role of political ideology in marketing (Fernandes and Mandel 2014;Khan et al 2013;Kidwell et al 2013;Roos and Shachar 2014;Winterich et al 2012) by extending the influence of ideology to consumers' attempts to differentiate their identity. Our work thereby suggests that identity is a useful framework for studying the role of ideology in consumer behavior.…”

“…This yielded 24 search indexes in each of Political Ideology. We collected two measures that have previously been used as proxies of state political ideology (Jost et al 2003;Khan et al 2013;Roos and Shachar 2014): (1) the percentage of people who self-identified as conservative in each state in the 2009-2015 Gallup state of the states metrics (M ¼ 38.77, SD ¼ 5.59), and (2) the number of times that the state was carried by a Republican candidate in the five presidential elections from 2000 to 2016 (M ¼ 2.74, SD ¼ 2.24). The two measures were strongly correlated (r ¼ .89, p < .01).…”

“…Finally, like other facets of social identity, individuals' political ideology defines a set of norms that shapes their thoughts, feelings, and actions (Jost et al 2003;Nail et al 2009). Accordingly, ideological differences have recently been reported in certain consumer behaviors including variety seeking (Fernandes and Mandel 2014), brand choices in supermarkets (Khan et al 2013), recycling (Kidwell et al 2013), donation (Winterich et al 2012), and movie preferences (Roos and Shachar 2014).…”

Piracy and box office movie revenues: Evidence from Megaupload

“…11 We measure a movie's targeted audience size using information about the exhibition intensity of a movie in its first week in a given country. The number of opening screens is an important strategic variable and is closely related to the targeted audience and expected demand for a movie (Roos and Shachar, 2014). We do not directly use absolute numbers or market shares per country and week because such measures are endogenous (Sawhney and Eliashberg, 1996: 119).…”

Hyper-Media Search and Consumption

“…We use a "structural MDS" approach (Goettler and Shachar, 2001;Roos and Shachar, 2011) in formulating the match parameters (the δ ij 's in 2.6). This approach has several advantages, including parsimony and ease of interpretation, as it can produce a joint map of consumer preferences and blog locations.…”