Batman is the perfect metaphor for a strong brand and strong marketing. He’s a culmination of so many important factors: a strong name, a strong logo, always has a finger on pulse of new technology, attentive to PR but not dedicated to it, etc.



More over, we can say there is a real Batman brand experience. Put simply, Batman’s cool, and he’s such by a perfect orchestration of intrinsic characteristics. Anything Batman puts his name on or uses is easily identified as being part of his brand.



He’s modern and edgy yet still leans to the conservative side. Anything he does is going to be strategic and smart. He’s effective and efficient in all of his efforts. He always utilizes the sleekest, most current technologies. All of these things build to create the perception of what we know as Batman.



Your brand is no different. You have a logo, tagline and website – great. But what kind of promotions do you have running? Do they line up with your brand platform? What about your ads? Do they have the same look and feel as other marketing pieces? It’s this idea of consistency and cohesion that makes for a strong and memorable brand – hence a classic “brand” like Batman.

Source: http://www.gorilla76.com/blog/the-batman-brand,608/

Here is a cute video about the evolution of our great Batman!

Batman Universe - Comics

Batman's comic covers

Batman: Arkham Asylum interior pages

When looking at a comic book, most people see… a comic book. It’s made of paper; it’s worth a few bucks… Others, yet, may see a treasure, sometimes even a nearly priceless jewel, depending on the superhero featured and the year it was issued.

In February 2010, Heritage Auction Galleries announced that a rare copy of “Detective Comics #27” had been sold for 1.075 million dollars. The price of this comic book issued in 1939 went that high for the reason that it featured Batman’s first appearance ever and therefore unleashed the incredible appetite of collectors, comic books fans and other bat-maniacs who usually feed on more recent and more common issues and who are willing to spend their family-savings in order to become the owner of such a rare copy.

This made me wonder: how is this possible? And what is “Batman” worth today?

The first question being more directed to sociologists and comic books fans, I decided to focus on the second one.

In his book Strategic Brand Management, Kevin Lane Keller explains that the concept of “brand valuation” is very controversial. Indeed, there is no active market for brands like there are markets for stocks, commodities, real estate, etc. Very specialized knowledge of marketing , accounting and trademark law is required to assess the actual role of the brand on a balance sheet and it is fairly obvious that brand valuation is based on art as much as on science.

However, the company Interbrand uses a formula that provides you with an idea of how much your brand is worth, give or take, which is actually a useful tool, keeping in mind it is impossible to reduce the richness of a brand to a single, meaningful number.

This formula calculates the brand value as the Net Present Value of the forecast brand earnings, discounted by the brand discount rate.

Unfortunately enough, no information of this kind is made available to the public regarding Batman.

Nevertheless, one can safely assume Batman is worth more and more as each movie brings more income, derived products and media attention than the one before. In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman movie reached 100 million dollars of profit in only ten days – a studio record – and went on to become the biggest hit and the most successful franchise in Warner’s history to that point. Less than 20 years after, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight reached 314.2 million dollars in 10 days, new studio record again. This latest adaptation had also the title of biggest opening weekend at the box-office, until the last Harry Potter movie came out in 2011.

If we cannot determine how much Batman is worth, we can at least recognize its brand equity kept increasing with time and now has a stronger than ever symbolic meaning and value to customers, either old-school’s fans or new comers. The values of the brand are well-known by the general public, and because those values are embodied by the character himself they are easier to convey in all Batman products: comics, movies, cartoons, video games, and even clothing.

At last, for those of you readers who are disappointed not to have an actual number that estimates Batman’s net worth, I would like to point out that very serious Forbes Magazine releases every year its list of the wealthiest fictional characters. Net worth estimates are based on an analysis of the fictional character’s source material, and where possible, valued against known real-world commodity and share price movements. Bruce Wayne is ranked at the 8th position this year with over 7 billion dollars of net worth.

Hello Reader!

As you may have noticed, the purpose of this blog is to study and discuss the strategic management of Batman TradeMark, which is owned by DC comics, and broadly popularized by Warner Bros.

I am going to try and let you know more about Batman and its values from a branding perspective.
However, I have the hope you will share on this blog any kind of insight you may have on the topic as I would like, myself, to learn more about it. So feel free to comment any of my posts or any of my colleagues' posts.

To introduce our journey, I would like to reset the stage and state what is fairly obvious to some and maybe less to others: Batman's values.

Batman - I am referring to the character here - is a skilled detective and agile fighter, operating almost exclusively at night, with a number of gadgets or vehicles. He is an avenger who wants to protect Gotham's citizens from a tragedy like the one he endured as a child when his parents were murdered in front of him. The strong moral component of his character makes it impossible for him to kill another person. In the day-time, he is a well-known businessman and philantropist.

It is very important to understand this very complex character - one of the most complex in comics' history - because his values have a direct impact on brand management.
Indeed, it is interesting to notice that successive comic books, movies, tv shows, cartoons and video games, although using different approaches to the character and therefore different positioning strategies, remained consistent with these core values that are the importance of justice and morality, the mindset of a detective, a measured use of gadgets and violence.

In other words, Batman products such as movies - to take an example everyone knows - have been able to target very different consumers through the evolution of their different positioning strategies, while being consistent with Batman's values which basically represent the brand's DNA. Indeed, I am sure everyone can agree Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton had different positionings in their respective movies (although one could object such a gap is linked to the decade that went by between their works). One being based on fantastic imagery, the other much more down-to-earth (ergo accessible to a larger and older crowd).

Coca Cola and Apple are maybe the two greatest and most successful examples of consistency over time regarding values. Strategic Brand Management may not be going to reveal its deepest secrets to us but still, we can try and determine whether our favorite superhero deserves to be standing between the famous woman-shaped bottle and the half-eaten apple in the branding hall of fame.

It is in 39 that Bob Kane and Finger created the famous bat man for the Detective comics number 27. One year after superman's birth comes the dark knight, ready to become the protector of Gotham city.