At ICv2.com, Viz Media Vice President of Sales Gonzalo Ferreyra and Director of Retail Marketing David Rewalt discuss the publisher’s “Naruto Nation” campaign, which includes an accelerated release schedule for the insanely popular manga.
Just what will that that accelerated schedule — 12 volumes of Naruto in just four months — mean to retailers, consumers and other publishers?
… [W]hat impact do you expect this event to have on non-Naruto manga releases? You are sucking a lot of dollars out of the market.
GF: It’s a good question, I can’t say we’ve pondered it too deeply.
DR: The hope is that it will increase those. You’re driving more people into the retail stores and online to look at manga. So I would think that if you set your adjacencies up right, and you do all the right marketing elements, you hope it positively affects sales. That’s the hope anyway.
That’s $100 over four months.
GF: You mean where is the money coming from out of the consumer’s pocket?
Even at the retail level — how do they stock? If they’re going to bring in 12 Naruto volumes over 4 months, that’s a big part of their open to buy.
GF: Everybody has been quite ready to accommodate it in their budgets, without necessarily stealing the full portion of that from the rest of their purchasing power. Without a sharper crystal ball in front of me, it’s a tough one to answer. I think as an industry we’re going to learn a great deal about what this kind of event does for us. There’s the potential of a downside, we obviously see tremendous potential for an upside in terms of the overall category getting a lift and drawing consumers. I think the consumer ultimately is going to make the decision and will make very clear to us whether it was a wise move or not.
The accelerated release schedule begins in September with Naruto, Vol. 16.
June 7th, 2007 at 9:50 am
While I can’t speak to what it would do to the overall market, I’m more than happy that they’re speeding up the release schedule.
I got interested in Naruto thanks to the tv show, but when I looked into the manga, it was already pretty far behind what had happened on the US televised version. So ultimately I decided not to bother picking up the manga. To keep the market interested, they need to get the manga out in front of the cartoon, not lagging behind it, or else they won’t draw in those people (like me) who came to this property through the tv show.
January 17th, 2011 at 6:24 pm
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