It’s always surprised me how little Cineworld (and other big cinema chains) have made of building a community of film-goers, especially given their Unlmited cards.
Here’s what Cineworld do right now towards engaging with customers:
- If you sign up to their website, you can keep track of your bookings, and anything you’ve ordered from their shop. Note that unlimited customers can’t advance book tickets, so that’s not helpful.
- If you sign up to their website, you can keep track of anything you buy in their shop section. Since the only thing they appear to sell is cinema gift cards, that’s not hugely handy for unlimited customers unless they’re buying for someone else.
- If you follow Cineworld on Twitter, they have competitions and info, and answer questions you may have. Handy, but not the most engaged community.
I’ll preface my ideas about how they could both improve the experience they provide for customers and their engagement by saying that as I understand it, right now, they can’t connect the use of an Unlimited card to an actual user account so those ideas are a little fanciful just now. The rest are not.
That important issue aside, a few thoughts.
First and foremost, a cinema-focussed community is about films: seeing them, discussing them, and figuring out what else we would like to see. From that:
Each film shown at Cineworld should be followable from the moment it’s added to the release schedules. They maintain a list of future releases. Users should be able to add those films to the list of films that they would like to see. Once they’re nearly out, it would then be trivial to send reminders to all interested users that whatever they want to see is nearly out.
Now, importantly, this could not only apply to future releases, but current releases and past releases. It would be useful to know when a classic film is being re-released, or shown as part of the cinema’s sporadic classic film series.
Having trackable films leads quite comfortably into having rateable films. Users should be able to give a personal rating for every film they have seen. Once you have this information, you can start to push a lot of interesting functionality. You can do things like take the noise out of the listings page. If I can view a listings page of current releases that I have not already seen, that clearly makes picking something a smoother process. Films that I had already tracked as wanting to see could be highlighted, and films the cinema think would be of interest (more later) could be too.
Additionally, if Cineworld could track viewing through Unlimited card usage, the tracking of films viewed could be automated and reminders for ratings could be sent out.
Now, knowing what the users think of each and every film, it would be possible to start employing the same ideas that have helped Amazon and Netflix: based on prior ratings, personal recommendations could be made on what to view next. This seems so obvious to me I’m surprised that no cinema chain has picked up on it. Netflix practically built their business on top of it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the first cinema chain to do this seriously disrupts their industry in the same way.
Tracking, rating and recommendation: the three obvious pillars on which to build a community. That’s just a starter. I’ll be discussing the social aspects and stickiness in part 2.