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Anatomy of a Brand
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Harry Potter Brand WizardTo some, Potter-mania seems like a fad, but it contains lessons that are relevant to the entire marketing community
July 18, 2005
Harry Potter is one of the most remarkable brand stories of recent years. So much so, that there can’t be a single person anywhere who hasn’t heard of “the boy who lived” and the best-selling books that bear his name. To date, six books in the seven-book series have been published and approximately 250 million copies have been sold worldwide. This places the boy wizard third on the all-time bestsellers list, after The Bible (2.5 billion copies sold) and The Thoughts of Chairman Mao (800 million). J.K. Rowling’s books have been translated into 61 different languages, including Icelandic, Serbo-Croat, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Swahili, Ukrainian, and Afrikaans, to say nothing of novelty editions in Latin, Gaelic and ancient Greek. In addition to the books themselves, the first three Harry Potter adventures have been made into live-action movies by Warner Brothers, earning some US$ 1.6 billion at the global box office and a further $750 million in DVD, video and broadcasting rights sales. More than 400 items of ancillary merchandise are also available: everything from candy and key rings to computer games and glow-in-the-dark glasses. It is estimated that the Harry Potter brand is worth $4 billion, or thereabouts, and that Rowling is a dollar billionaire. Not bad for someone who was a poverty-stricken single parent, living on state benefits in an unheated Edinburgh apartment, less than a decade ago.
Staggering as the sales figures are, the Harry Potter “effect” goes far beyond the bottom line. The entire children’s book sector has been invigorated by the achievements of the teenage mage: applications to boarding schools have rocketed in the wake of the HP phenomenon; EFL teachers claim that the texts are ideal workbooks for those wishing to improve their grasp of the mother tongue, as do parents of children with learning difficulties; owls are proving increasingly popular as household pets, much to the dismay of Animal Rights activists; the locations used in the movies are proving popular with tourists (though some sites have been chastised by Warner Brothers’ legal department for advertising the connection); and the Potter vocabulary of “Quidditch,” “Muggles,” “Gryffindor,” “Slytherin,” “Hogwarts,” et al, is now part of the vernacular.
The boy wizard is Britain’s biggest cultural export since the Beatles and James Bond.
