Ask John: Could Better Marketing Increase the Mainstream American Popularity of Anime?

Question:
Do you believe that with better marketing anime companies can achieve more mainstream successes with titles that have potential, and with a higher ratio of mainstream titles to niche, the anime market can sustain itself, or even expand some?

Answer:
In response to a recent flurry of debate in America’s anime community regarding the diminishing returns of the anime industry and potential ways to return the industry to profitability I’ve seen numerous opinions to the effect that American anime sales are in decline partially because American consumers just aren’t interested in the majority of anime. The fact that American consumers generally aren’t interested in vintage anime is an established fact that needs no supporting evidence. The demand for the majority of contemporary anime is minimal because American consumers aren’t interested in the genres that dominate contemporary anime production – particularly “moe,” harem sitcoms, romance dramas, and giant robot anime. The type of anime that consistently sells well in America is action/adventure anime targeted at teenage and young adult male viewers – titles like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D, Dragon Ball Z, Afro Samurai, Naruto, and Bleach. Yet Japan’s anime industry isn’t presently producing a large number of shonen adventure anime these days, presumably because that type of anime isn’t what’s most popular in Japan right now.

At the peak of its American popularity and profitability anime generated only a quarter of the annual sales revenue that it earns in Japan. America’s best selling anime DVD titles rarely move over a million copies, and many may sell fewer than 5,000 copies. Mainstream awareness certainly boosts an anime title’s commercial viability, but I have the distinct impression that anime is, and always will be, a niche market product in America. While mainstream advertising may provide a relatively marginal boost in market potential, I believe that anime is inherently a product of limited commercial potential in America, so no amount of advertising is ever going to make anime sales grow tremendously larger than they’ve already reached. While I do think that today’s young American fans will be more interested in consuming anime when they become self-supporting and affluent adults, that burgeoning market probably isn’t large enough to drastically increase the size of America’s anime consumer base beyond its present size.

The argument from particular American fans that Japan’s anime industry should produce more titles that appeal to American viewers if the industry wants to earn American consumer spending worries me. Conjoined with this demand is a frequently stated American fan insistence that anime is inordinately expensive or not worth its retail price. Ironically, the ideal rectification to these complaints is to cease being an anime fan. The most efficient route to secure inexpensive, innovative, stylish animation designed to appeal to American viewers would be to encourage domestic production studios like Warner Bros., Disney, Pixar, Animation Collective, and the Cartoon Network’s production houses to develop an original American animation style that emulates superficial characteristics of Japanese animation.

The appeal of Japanese animation is, or should be, the fact that it’s Japanese animation (emphasis on “Japanese”). Anime is interesting to American viewers because it’s culturally and artistically different from typical American animation. That is, however, both a blessing and a curse. The uniqueness of anime makes it appealing to consumers interested in esoteric entertainment, but the anomalism of anime also limits its potential appeal to average consumers. Expanded advertising and marketing targeted outside of the hardcore fan community, aimed specifically at receptive but not “hardcore” anime fans indeed may have some potential to turn unaware potential consumers into customers, but the very nature of that tentative market makes advertising especially risky.

Since advertising is so prominent, consumers have a natural tendency to presume that it’s cheap. On the contrary, print advertisements in major magazines with nationwide distribution can be prohibitively expensive for America’s anime companies. Higher profile advertising methods like TV broadcast or nationwide theater ads are, naturally, even more expensive. The cost of advertising has to be weighed against the possibility that even if such advertising reaches new consumers, those new casual consumers may not bring enough new revenue into the anime market to justify the cost of attracting their attention. Furthermore, as already established, the untapped potential market for anime that could be reached by new advertising may not be especially large. There are certainly millions of American consumers who are not exposed to frequent anime marketing or advertising, but I suspect that no amount of advertising will convince the majority of those Americans to purchase anime DVDs.

Importing a larger number of anime titles with potential to become massive, mainstream, commercial hits that can sustain America’s anime industry – titles like Naruto, Afro Samurai, Pokemon, The Animatrix, Karas, Witchblade, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children – may have some effect. But this is also a risky proposition. Titles like Ergo Proxy and Samurai Champloo seemed obviously designed to appeal to American viewers, but didn’t succeed because they felt too bluntly and clumsily designed for international appeal. Encouraging Japan’s industry to produce more titles specifically for American release doesn’t guarantee successful shows. Co-productions run the risk of being less “anime” and more American animation commissioned for production by Japanese studios. And in that case, it would be more efficient and less risky to just encourage American studios to create Japanese style animation.

In summation, I think that the lack of major advertising to mainstream American potential consumers is not an oversight, but rather a calculated decision based on return on investment analysis. Additional advertising, in the form of print ads, TV commercials, and short trailers, I suspect, may have a limited potential for success because if there are few people tentatively interested in purchasing anime, even if they are convinced to buy, they still account for only a few additional sales. I think that the anime industry concentrates on marketing to the core anime fan market because it is the core fan community that represents the majority audience for the majority of anime.