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'XXX' gives you 14 million hits on Google; 'David Beckham', a mere 1.2 million; and the 'Holy Bible', 25 million. Type 'Harry Potter' into that little box. 25.6 MILLION, and counting… Pottermania has seen 270 million books sold worldwide. And British Chancellor Gordon Brown has gone on to say that Harry Potter’s creator — Joanne Kathleen Rowling — has 'done more for literacy around the world than any single human being'! Even Prince Charles admitted to being a Harry Potter fan when his statement “Harry Potter is just Wizard” made headlines worldwide.
If all Harry Potter books sold were placed end to end, they would go around the equator three times; or they could be used to carpet Monaco 6.5 times over! On its first day of sale in The United Kingdom, ‘Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix’ (Book five) sold at the rate of 21 books per second. If all those books sold in the UK in the first day were stacked up, the pile would be 12 times higher than Mount Everest. The number of Harry Potter books ever sold is more than the population of the UK, France, and Germany put together. And if one person were to read every Harry Potter book ever sold — at the rate of one per day — it would take him over 900,000 years to do so.
In 2001, Harry Potter, a 11-year old boy-wizard came into our world, and took our lives by storm. His cruel muggle (non-magical beings) stepfamily, his friends, his adventures at the Hogwarts school of magic and his constant battle against the evil forces, touched a chord in every one of us who followed his adventures. And follow his adventures we did.
Today, the sixth installment of the Harry Potter saga — ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ (HP&THBP) — is selling faster than any other book in the history of the world. In Canada, 1,200 books were sold every single minute in its first two hours of release; in Britain, an average of 750 copies were bought EVERY SINGLE MINUTE OF THE FIRST 24 HOURS; in the United States. it sold 6.9 MILLION copies in the first 24 hours — roughly moving at about 250,000 an hour, which is more than five times what 99 per cent of what all books ever published sell in their lifetimes! And online retailer Amazon had over 1.4 million advance orders with two weeks still to go.
You do the math!
"We sold 3,715 copies of 'Order of the Phoenix' in 25 months, and 4,000 copies of ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ in less than 24 hours. Book six has out-sold book five by 285 copies in a miniscule fraction of the time-span!" says Hemu Ramaiah, CEO Landmark, Chennai.
Says R. Sriram, CEO Crossword, “We sold 10,000 copies of the book (nationwide) on the first day itself, which is the highest amount of books we've ever sold in a single given day. The book released on a Saturday and our sales were 500 per cent more than that of a regular Saturday. And 30 per cent of these sales were generated from products other than ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’.” Huh? What products other than HP&THBP???
The in-store excitement of being among the first few to acquire this fascinating, magical, and mysterious book, led many people to spend several hours, after actually buying the book, in the store. And this, in turn, spurred the sale of several other items. “The excitement of the release of this book triggered off the sale of the back list of Harry Potter,” says Hemu Ramaiah, adding, “for a lot of customers, ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ was their first in the series, and a lot of them bought one or two of the previous ones, so as to understand this one from a better perspective. A few people even bought all other five books in the series.”
Several of the stores in England and the United States actually threw parties that night, to celebrate the much-awaited-for arrival of HP&THBP. “About 40 per cent of customers who bought the latest Potter book at Barnes & Noble also bought another item,” Chief Executive Steve Riggio claims, “The other items ranged from other Harry Potter-related products, including earlier installments or the audio edition of the current book, to other completely non-related books.”
“At Borders, the majority of those who purchased ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ purchased at least one another item in the same transaction,” spokeswoman Anne Roman says, adding, “and most of the additional items were non-bestsellers aimed at adults.”
“It's like the Domino Effect,” says Sriram of Crossword, adding, “People come into the store with the intention of buying just that one book; in this case, usually one for their children and they do end up buying more books (or even other things like music) — if not for their kids, then for themselves.”
"All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Viagra, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Ebay, Palm, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Red Bull, Intel, and Blackberry."
Al Ries and Laura Ries
The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.
Harry Potter. Harry Potter is the only book mentioned among all those multinational, globally recognised, brands. Is Harry Potter a brand? Of course it is.
The emotional connect people have with Harry Potter is the same as they have with their favourite brands. Harry Potter is also the only book ever to have cut through all sections of society, culture, and ages. When was the last time you had people between the ages of five and 75, in India, Britain, Germany, Italy, France, China, North America and the West Indies, all reading the same book (to themselves; for their own enjoyment) at the very same time???
The marketing strategy for Harry Potter was very simple: They relied nearly completely on public relations. And it worked. With the first book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/ Philosopher’s Stone” in 2001, the advertising value equivalent of Harry Potter press coverage in the UK from July to December 2001 was an astounding £21,171,308.
After the first 100 million copies of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone” were sold, the publishers brought out a campaign which was targeted solely at bringing in more readers; it read: “100 million fans can't be wrong”. And their sales soared.
To read the entire story, grab your copy of Impact Advertising and Weekly magazine issue dated July 25-31, 2005