K atie c ouric

A Market Research Case Study: Florence Foster Jenkins
Once, my team and I did a market research test for Paramount Pictures on
the 2016 movie 
Florence Foster Jenkins
with Meryl Streep and Hugh
Grant. Paramount wanted to test how to position the movie to their target
audiences.
If you haven’t seen it, Streep plays the titular character who wants to
become a professional opera singer before she passes away. Paramount was
struggling to find a tagline for the film. They considered five options,
including “You’re never too old,” “Dream big,” and “Every voice matters.”
But they needed data and analysis to help make the best decision about the
core message to use for the film’s marketing.
My team tested variations of the taglines against 561,756 people—53
percent female and 47 percent male—in the United States whose interests
include “musical film,” “biographical film,” and “Meryl Streep” since they
were most likely to view the film. Reaching an audience of this size with
traditional market research, or running these tests on TV, could take weeks
and significant budgets. Instead, we completed our tests within forty-eight
hours and for a fraction of the cost because we leveraged the Facebook ad
platform as a market research tool to segment all these tests and collect data
in real time. Once the tests were completed, we quickly compiled the data
in an extensive forty-one-page report to make sure we were as thorough as
possible with the findings—that way Paramount could make the most
informed decision for their campaign.
When we delivered the final report, the Paramount executives were a bit
shocked by the level of detail we generated in such a short period. They

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began to realize they had a new, cost-efficient, and fast data source to help
make future decisions about which messages to put millions of dollars
behind. And this was all made possible because of testing and conducting
our own makeshift market research with the correct target audiences.