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Is Marvel’s diversity strategy paying off?
Marvel's introduction of Riri Williams, a15-year-old black girl set to wear the mantle of Iron Man, is the latestcharacter created by the comic book publisher as part of a trend to diversifyits super-hero cast.
But is diversification having any impact onits bottom line?
In recent years, the Disney-owned companyhas taken several steps to introduce greater racial and gender diversity: in2014, a black man became Captain America and Thor became a woman. The yearbefore that, Marvel introduced Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenager, as thesuper-hero Ms. Marvel.
One reason for increasing characterdiversity is to expand Marvel's audience, according to Augie De Blieck Jr., acolumnist at Comic Book Resources.
"Marvel has relied on anever-dwindling population to market its books to. Overwhelmingly, that's whitemen now in their 30s and 40s, who were reading comics during the last comicbooms," he told CNBC via email.
"They need new people to market theircomics to. With the boom in movie and television superheroes, there's anaudience out there that craves this superhero material now. Those people aren'talways being marketed to, like children, women, and insert your favorite ethnicminority in the United States here."
Research by Helena Wu in 2014 for DukeUniversity suggests diversity does make a difference to sales.
Wu examined the impact of featuring femaleand ethnic leads on the sales of video games across four major genres.
"The findings show that while shooterand adventure games conform to the conventional pattern where female and ethniccharacters contribute negatively to sales, RPGs (role-playing games) favor theinclusion of female lead characters and action games favor the inclusion ofethnic lead characters," she said in the report entitled 'Video GameSales: Does Diversity Pay?'.
Along with the huge successes of the Marvelcinematic universe and other marketing decisions, the creative choice todiversify seems to be paying off for the company.
Marvel controls around 40 percent of comicbook market share in the U.S., according to the pop culture website ICv2. Also,the overall U.S. comic book market has grown in recent years: sales of comicswere around $579 million in 2015, a year-on-year increase of 7.17 percent,according to figures compiled by comics history site Comichron.
However, this growth isn't due to theMarvel films turning movie audiences into new comic book readers, according tode Blieck.
"In many ways, the comics market hasnever been stronger, but that strength and growth isn't coming from Marvel andDC," explained de Blieck.
"The new readers are more likely tocome from publishers like Scholastic, whose school book fairs create books thatpopulate the New York Times best-sellers lists on a regular basis," hesaid. "TV shows that are focused on a single series, like The Walking Deador Preacher, are also more likely to bring in new readers."
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