Readers getting high on magic Pot(ter)

I can never resist using a bad pun for a title – especially when it’s even remotely accurate.  Lucky for me, this one fits perfectly, as the events of the past week have shown.

To the interested observer (that’s me), the release of the final Harry Potter book in the septology (?) has only proven to only solidify what we’ve known for some time now – people love reading about this kid.  While it started out as a phenomenon of the very young, the fuss around J.K. Rowling’s adventures at the mythical Hogwarts school for wizards has grown exponentially, into a somewhat of a global phenomenon.

Each morning for the past few weeks I’ve walked by my local Chapters store to see Potter-related advertisements plastering the store as if it were the only book on sale.  Each night on the news, I’ve seen stories further hyping the mythology around Harry’s final year at wizard school.  Even yesterday as the British Open golf tournament was entrenched in a playoff for the Championship, cameras found a young muggle (yup, I know all the terms) hopelessly entrenched in the new Potter volume, ignoring the wizardry of Sergio Garcia and Padraig Harrington on the links.

So where exactly am I going with this?  Glad you asked.

In a world where electronic media is all around us and (almost) all-consuming, Potter is proving to be an important reminder that “old” media is not dead – not by a long shot.  In fact, the Potter phenomenon is not only getting people back into book stores, it’s making reading cool for young kids and dragging parents, babysitters, and kids at heart back along for the ride.  It’s perhaps the world’s greatest example of a niche going mainstream, and the publishing industry is cashing in.  And rightfully so.

What Potter has done is inspired what, one would assume, should be a niche audience to the level where they went out and became evangelists for reading.  As the franchise grew, intelligently, publishers began issuing a second, “Adult Edition” (get your mind out of the gutter, it’s still a kids book) of the Potter books to hook even more of an audience.  Now, as the franchise takes what should be its final bow (well, I guess they’ve still got a couple more movies to go…), it’s a good time to make note of what’s happened here.

Not long ago, books seemed to be becoming a medium of the past.  Kids had TV.  Kids had the internet.  Kids had video games.  There was little time in their lives for books and as we know, adults rarely have time in their lives for anything.  But Harry changed all that.  Potter took a shrinking niche and expanded it – so much so that kids who previously had no time for even the thinnest of paperbacks are now logging off IM, turning off the tube and turning on their imaginations as they pour over epic mauscripts that are hundreds of pages in length!  An unlikely and unpredictable turn, but one that bodes well for creators of content as media, and consumerism as a whole, really is increasingly looking to find that dedicated niche, hook them, and then expand that audience.
So while the world holds its breath to see whether Harry will live or die, the publishing industry is similarly verklempt as they look for the next franchise to take the torch and run with it.  But marketers everywhere should really be paying attention to the final days of Rowling’s magical tale, hoping to learn the secret of Harry’s greatest spell and use it to hook their niche on a little Potter of their own.

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