Reese Witherspoon uses book club as focus group

Reese Witherspoon, actress and founder of media company Hello Sunshine, speaks with Erin Oles, President and Chief Marketing Officer of Salesforce, at Dreamforce in San Francisco.

The conversation focuses largely on her film career. Along the way, Witherspoon explains how Hello Sunshine uses its audience to determine where the company should invest.

An empty market

It starts with a script she finds offensive, about a man whom two women are fighting over. She begins investigating.

Reese Witherspoon: “I went to the head of every studio in Hollywood and asked what they were developing with a woman in the lead. Every studio said: nothing. One studio head said they were developing one film with a woman in the lead but couldn’t have two in the same year. The total market is half the world, and they weren’t even considering it. I could keep being amazed by that problem or do something about it.”

She rents a small office, finances the company herself and buys the film rights to Gone Girl and Wild before the books are published. Later comes the series Big Little Lies, which she develops with Nicole Kidman. In 2021, Hello Sunshine is sold to Candle Media, which is backed by Blackstone.

The book club as a test market

Reese’s Book Club selects a book every month. The club was created after someone impersonated Witherspoon on Facebook and ran a book club in her name: “They were choosing books I would never choose. Then I thought: I need to take ownership of this myself.”

“We created some structure around it, with one book a month and videos in which I explain why I like the book. We now have 3.5 million followers on Instagram and more than 60 million people across all of Hello Sunshine’s and Reese’s Book Club’s platforms.”

The club is also a measurement tool: “The book club is a good litmus test. We choose a book, and if it resonates with an audience, we have empirical data to build on. All our media platforms, whether it’s Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, are a litmus test for what we should invest in next. That’s how we follow our audience’s interests and stop doing what doesn’t work.”

Film, series or podcast

Before anything is produced, the team determines which format is right for each story: “We sit down and ask ourselves: is this a TV series or a film? If it’s a film, is it going to be a streaming film or do we try to make it a theatrical release? And who is it for? Before we start anything, there is a lot of fundamental work involved in understanding the viewer.”

Behaviour, not rhetoric

Some of that customer knowledge comes from her clothing brand Draper James: “Building a retail business was not my best idea. It’s just a very difficult business. But I learned to understand customers better: what people are willing to pay for and what they aren’t. You can have principles about how something is made, for example by artisans. Nobody wants to pay a premium for that. People talk all day about how they don’t want fast fashion. Everyone is principled until they get to the checkout. So look at customer behaviour, not what people say online. Film is no different. What do people go to the cinema for? What do they prefer to binge?”

Go where the audience is

Oles refers to an earlier comment by Witherspoon: you have to go where the audience is instead of complaining that it isn’t coming to you. Witherspoon: “You have to stay constantly alert. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. You can’t complain that nobody wants to watch a two- or three-hour film anymore. You have to adapt: your message needs to have more impact and come in shorter pieces. You need to allocate your marketing budget more thoughtfully. The eyes are on YouTube; you can’t compete with that.”

Trust is becoming scarce

“You have to get people’s attention by being authentic. I’m seeing more and more that people don’t trust anyone anymore. If you have people in your network or in the world that you want to use, look at whether people trust them. That is going to become one of the most important values.”

www.hello-sunshine.com

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