“We Were On A Break!”
Hello 👋, old friends! We have missed you.
They will always be there for us, more than two decades later, and we are very happy 😄 about that. The official trailer of Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer in Friends’ very expensive 💰 reunion special was filmed at the show’s original soundstage in Burbank - cozy Central Perk couch 🛋 and all. Joining the sextet will be a variety of beloved Friends supporting actors, including Christina Pickles, Tom Selleck, James Michael Tyler, Maggie Wheeler, and Elliott Gould, with the cast indulging us with an episode table-read and extensive Q&A about their memories. Unfortunately, the chick 🐤 and the duck 🦆 were busy. Friends: The Reunion will end its break and premiere on May 27.
Watch the trailer of Friends: The Reunion 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRXVQ77ehRQ.
Barely three minutes into the pilot episode 🎞 of Friends (The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate), the audience gets introduced to Rachel Green - played by Jennifer Aniston - as she bursts through the doors 🚪 of the now universally recognised Central Perk in her wedding dress 👗, having hotfooted it straight from the altar, leaving behind her orthodontist fiancé, Barry.
She has run away from her potential domestic set-up - married at 24 to a man she did not love - to search for an alternative life in the big city 🌃. Later in the episode, she sits at her high-school friend Monica Geller’s kitchen table as the others encourage her to cut ✂️ up the credit cards 💳 paid for by her father. It is a symbolic severing of ties to her family as she starts a new life in the city with Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, Joey, and Ross. “Welcome to the real world,” says Monica. “It sucks. You are going to love it.”.
In that opening episode, which premiered 25 years ago, Friends let its audience know exactly what the show would be about. Marriage 💍 was abandoned (or, in Ross’s case, over not long after it had begun). Parents were out of the picture 🖼. The people these characters would rely on every week were each other. They were six slightly clueless twenty-somethings muddling their way through relationships, jobs 💼, and life. Not sure where they were heading, but not too worried about it either.
There are hidden 🔍 marketing lessons from Friends that defined pop culture for millennials, and still continues to do so after it ended years back. Here are 6 marketing lessons from this famous TV show that we can learn from and get a new perspective.
1️⃣ Know your customer
One of the key 🔑 ways for business and marketing success is to have a deep understanding of your customer. Friends as a TV show nailed this concept early on in character development itself. The characters in the TV show are not a perfect ✨ bunch of happy-go-lucky pals. Instead, they are flawed and are trying to be better - just like the rest of us.
Ross has a not-so-great experience in finding luck 🍀, Rachel is trying to make an identity for herself, Joey is struggling to be an actor, Monica is a cleanliness 🧼 freak, Chandler is that one humorous friend in every group, and Phoebe is not as great a singer 🎤 as she thinks she is. The characters are special to us because they are ordinary, and it makes them relatable. We love them because we think they are like us.
2️⃣ Know what sells and market it
It is important to measure 📏 the success of that content when you understand your audience and create content for them. This is so that you can validate your hypothesis and assumptions you made about your audience. Take that learning to refine 💅🏻 your content strategy if something did not work. If something worked, pinpoint it and do more of it.
Make it a part of your content. We have all loved the crazy couple - Monica and Chandler in the show. Did you know this couple was originally planned to be just a short term fling. However, the audience response for this new couple was fantastic, and the show-makers were listening 👂. They decided to make Monica-Chandler a serious relationship throughout the show, which resulted in the couple becoming iconic 🤩.
3️⃣ Leverage the power of influencers
Most marketers are now aligned with the fact that influencers have become a very important ❗️ part of marketing strategy. Influencers allow brands to reach out to a new audience that loves and trusts 🤝 those influencers. Friends taught us the power of influencers back when it was not mainstream.
They had multiple cameos of popular personalities throughout its 10 seasons including biggies like Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Noah Wyle, Bruce Willis, Charlie Sheen and more. Another thing to note was that each of these cameo characters were naturally and organically 🌱 built into the storyline. They did not look forced. This is something marketers and brands should keep in mind while designing the content strategy.
4️⃣ Create mysteries about your products or services
It is easy to get carried away and start revealing the USPs or selling points when you approach a launch 🚀 of a product or service. This is one way of doing things, but curiosity is something that can give you more attention 👀. Sometimes, holding back information makes people want to stick around and find out the hidden secret.
Friends showmakers kept the audience in the dark about whether Ross and Rachel would end up together for 10 whole years. That is because people love a mystery 🧐. Mystery marketing sells! That is if you are able to execute it right, sustain the mystery, and do a reveal that justifies the hype built.
5️⃣ Be relevant and relatable
The first ☝️ rule of creating content is to create it for your audience, not for you. Dig deeper into how they think and behave once you have identified your niche audience. Now, create content that they will be able to relate with and find relevant. Then, keep adapting. Friends had become known for the special Thanksgiving 🦃 episodes they would do every year and other special occasions. These episodes were created as per the moods of the public in that particular season (holidays).
The show makers would prepare these episodes way in advance and start building 🧱 up previous episodes to lead the special occasion episode. The content would look seamless - not forced or oddly placed. This is how the makers used trending opportunities to stay relevant, relatable, and valuable. This is precisely why marketers should keep an eye 👁 for upcoming trends, so you can leverage them before everyone latches on. First movers in trends usually have an advantage.
6️⃣ Virality is not achieved overnight. It takes time and planning
Marketers get impressed and inspired while people see the crazy 🤪 virality a campaign catches and the numbers that come along with it. They want to replicate it, but what they do not see is the months or weeks worth of planning, consumer research, data analysis, and a right execution strategy that goes behind that campaign.
Although Friends gained an iconic status and insane fan following in the 90's and 2000’s, it was not sold to be that fantastic 👍 initially. The reviews were average when it just began. However, the showmakers kept at it, kept adapting the content, started thinking 🤔 in advance on what to serve to their audience in order to prevent monotony from building, and eventually constantly refining the strategy.
If you need a hand with your marketing strategies, slide into our direct messages, and “we will be there for you...” 🤩😎.
References:
Ivie, D. 2021, May 19. The One Where We Find Ourselves Weeping at the Friends Reunion Trailer. Vulture.
Tandon, P. 2020, February 24. 6 Remarkable Marketing lessons from FRIENDS TV Show. Young Urban Project.
Thorp, C. 2019, September 20. Friends: The show that changed our idea of family. BBC Culture.
