The Color Purple: Marketing Lessons from a Revitalized Broadway Play

Nobody ever accused the Broadway play “The Color Purple” of being a masterpiece. After it opened its doors in New York in 2005 and got lukewarm reviews from the critics, it soldiered on like many New York shows do,  attracting audiences of suburbanites, tourists and conventioneers.

Enter the Star

Then Fantasia Barrino came along and stepped into the lead role of Miss Celie. You remember her - the charismatic, sandpaper-voiced dynamo who won American Idol a few seasons ago.

Suddenly there was real star power in the cast. The show’s producers, much to their credit, didn’t wait for the world to beat a path to the theater door. They went out and engaged in some powerhouse marketing that catapulted the play to top earnings, with a fresh new life and revitalized potential.

Let’s take a look at some of the components behind the success, as reported in The New York Post on June 22nd, and see how they can spark new profits for your company too.

Component one: A quality product. The play is sound, based on the astonishing novel of the same name by Alice Walker. But with Fantasia in the cast, it becomes the real deal. Even Ben Brantley, the often-bored drama critic at The New York Times, said she was absolutely terrific in her role.

Component two: A unique selling proposition. Fantasia is a very hot commodity - and she isn’t appearing anywhere else at the moment.

Component three: Well-targeted customers. The play’s producers decided to reach beyond the usual tourists who come to New York and to attract tour groups from churches as far away as Tennessee.

Component four: Great packaging. For less than $200, each person in a church group gets round-trip bus transportation to the theater door, a ticket to the show and dinner afterwards at a nearby Broadway eatery.

Component five: Highly targeted, yet pervasive advertising. If you poke around the Internet looking for Alice Walker fan sites and other places related to novel or the play, you will find ads that link directly to tour packages for the Broadway show.

So if you have a product to sell  or revitalize,  why not use some of the same strategies to get some marketing sizzle working for you? You just might make your competitors purple with envy.