Let me tell you a story every marketer should hear and probably memorize.
Recently I saw a post about the comicbook Uncanny X-Men #211 from 1986.
This single comicbook issue was, in some ways, responsible for the downfall of a publishing empire, sending Marvel Comics into bankruptcy and not being given more life until the movies came out to pick up the slack… only for the studio to start repeating a similar mistake, with the actual publishing wing of Marvel not even making a profit anymore, from what I can tell, although I cannot say for sure either way.
Probably just depends how creative Shifty the Accountant in the back room gets.
Here’s what happened:
Writer Chris Claremont had been writing Uncanny X-Men for about 11 years. He took it from a tier 3 title nobody read to the #1 selling comicbook on the planet each month, paying him so much in royalties that he owned a plane, if that tells you something. And then one day in 1986 he woke up and decided:
“There are just too many mutants.”
And so he told his editor his plan to kill a bunch of the characters off.
That turned into what became known as the Mutant Massacre storyline. And Louise Simonson, who was writing the X-Men’s sister title X-Factor at the time, asked if she could play as it sounded like a lot of fun. So did a couple of other writers.
And so they ran this multi-part crossover.
And it was just a gigantic success — all from Chris’ brain fart. In fact, it was such a success the stock holders and powers that be at Marvel demanded a crossover event every year after that. That meant writers and editors now having to fit storylines and character development into these pre-determined crossovers.
Claremont hated it, so did other creatives, as you can imagine.
But the money guys loved it, and they made lots and lots and lots of sales each year doing it. Then Marvel was bought by another investor who didn’t give a shyte about comicbooks. He was the quintessential what I call “Psychological Marketer” — letting the numbers and metrics dictate everything, no matter what.
He wanted to squeeze every last penny he could out of it.
Customer experience & respect be daymed.
The “metrics” lead the way.
So not only did they do the forced crossover each year, but he would, for example, look at titles that had Wolverine in it, who usually boosted sales by his mere appearance. Thus, he declared Wolverine had to be in nearly every main comicbook title throughout the year as often as possible, whether it made sense or not. As Claremont put it after he left and they started giving the artists all the creative power over HIS storylines he’d been developing for over a decade:
(Paraphrased)
“For a guy [Wolverine] who is supposed to be a loner, he sure gets around…”
He was astonished how in just a year and a half after he left, how much they gutted his 10+ years of stories and build-up and ruined the context and mystery, and just merchandised everything to the point where there were now multiple variant covers, trading cards, 3D covers, poly bagged titles… all to get speculating investors to spend all their money each month to get them all.
Again, all due to the “metrics” leading the way.
Not customer experience or satisfaction or serving the true fans.
(Who made the company possible in the first place)
Eventually Marvel collapsed.
And it was brutal — there was literally at least one suicide and, from what I read, some others dropping dead or getting sick from the stress. There was also bankruptcy, and the company was so broke the owner who screwed it up started mandating employees use the bathroom in the restaurant in the building Marvel’s offices were in so the restaurant would get the bigger water bill. He would also punish people for not using both sides of copy paper and even collected staples off the floor so they could be reused, etc.
All this is in Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
Admittedly, I may have gotten a fact or two wrong (going on memory).
But basically that is what happened.
But back to Uncanny X-Men 211:
I started collecting around the time of this particular issue, and I remember watching it all unfold over the next 10 years. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. You could see the deterioration in the stories and the outright trying to squeeze as much as they could from the fans to the point of outright disrespect and, I would argue, contempt — with everything ruthlessly bent towards the bottom line. i.e., Psychological Marketing vs the what I call “Sociological Marketing” approach Stan Lee mostly used to build out the Marvel Universe 25 years earlier.
There are a lot of cautionary lessons in that story.
Like, for example, that Chinese proverb I have heard the great Matt Furey quote about how a strength overextended becomes a weakness. And, also, I’d add not letting spreadsheets and greed drive every nook and cranny of your business, and certainly not at the expense and lowered experience of your best and most loyal customers/clients.
A book I recently revisited is related to this topic called:
“The Tyranny of Metrics”
It’s not that metrics and tracking are bad. It’s just that they are often used to make incredibly bad — even deadly — decisions. Especially at hospitals (leading to deaths and suffering), with law enforcement, etc. When it all becomes about metrics it’s stop being about people.
All right, so that’s that.
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Ben Settle
