Because Tom Brevoort’s answers to readers’ questions are worth posting about every day – I’m entirely serious about that, by the way – here he is, talking about marketing’s effect on editorial over at Marvel:
I think that most people have an imprecise picture of just what marketing does, and what their responsibilities aer, and so it’s easy to think of them as evil suit-wearing guys who are out to destroy everything good and worthwhile in comics. (And in some periods, they may have been just that way.) But at least at Marvel right now, the Sales and Marketing Department works hand-in-hand with editorial, each team managing their own side of the equation. So nobody in marketing says, “Hey, you must do this story!” or demand a certain villain or whatnot. What they will do when appropriate is pass along the feedback they’re hearing from the retail community (and, by extension, the readership), and they may make suggestions for what they feel could improve sales or generate a response from the marketplace. But those suggestions are just that: suggestions. Sometimes we act on them, sometimes we don’t, and sometimes they start a chain of events that results in something far different from what they were suggesting in teh first place. But editorial doesn’t work for Sales and Marketing–it’s a completely separate area.
