A Paper by François Carrillat and Renaud Legoux Wins at the International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management
August 18, 2011
Their paper entitled “You could charm the critics and have nothing to eat: A meta-analysis of the effect of gatekeepers on motion picture performance” earned Professors François Carrillat and Renaud Legoux the Best Paper Award in Marketing at the 11th International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management. The event brought together over 200 participants last month in Antwerp, Belgium, and 125 papers were presented. The winning article was co-written by the two Associate Professors in Marketing at HEC Montréal and Professor Allègre Hadida, of Cambridge University.
The paper reports on a meta-analysis of international literature on the impact of film reviews on films’ box office performance. Based on 53 primary articles concerning 21,000 films, the meta-analysis provides significant results for researchers in this field, concerning decision making by marketing managers.
For instance, it notes that critics do in fact have a real impact, albeit a relatively small one: the number of reviews of a film apparently explains 6% of its box office sales, and critics’ opinion of the film, 4%. It also seems that critics have just as much influence on consumers as on box office predictions, apart from any influence on movie-goers’ individual choices. Lastly, surprisingly enough, the study shows that movie reviewers’ impact on box office receipts has been stable for the past 20 years, despite the explosion of information sources at consumers’ disposal, i.e. on the Internet, that might be expected to dilute the weight of their opinion.
The International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management is organized by the International Association of Arts and Cultural Management (AIMAC). It is a biennial event, held in a different host city each time. The first Conference was held in 1991 at HEC Montréal.
The professors François Carrillat and Renaud Legoux are associated with the Carmelle and Rémi-Marcoux Chair in Cultural Management at HEC Montréal. The Chairholder, François Colbert, is the founding President of AIMAC and co-Chair of the Scientific Committee for the International Conference on Arts and Cultural Management.
François Carrillat Renaud Legoux