OPINION17 October 2011
Morgan Spurlock’s latest film has a unique premise: it’s a film about product placement, funded completely by product placement. It’s called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, or to give it its full title, Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
It’s what you might call a meta-movie: a ‘making of’ documentary about itself. And it might never have been made without market research.
After pitching his idea to lots of friendly marketing people, none of whom called him back, Spurlock decided he needed to pin down his ‘brand personality’ in order to identify possible backers and sell his idea to them. So he approached Olson Zaltman Associates in the US, who tackled the problem using their ZMET methodology, in which respondents collect images to reflect their thoughts and feelings and discuss them with a researcher (jump to 12:14 in the video of his TED talk above for that part).
In Spurlock’s own words, “There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there.” Lindsay Zaltman offers a slightly more nuanced analysis, concluding that Spurlock’s brand personality is a rare combination of ‘mindful’ and ‘playful’ – a bit like Apple, Wii and Mini. Armed with this insight Spurlock managed to get enough brands on board to get the film made.