Lewis Syring: How Basic Marketing and Storytelling Principles Can Help Hollywood's Film Industry

Adapting to a rapidly changing marketplace is never an easy proposition, and it is almost always especially difficult for the largest and most established businesses to do so while operating within such a marketplace. Given the rapid turnover of high-level executives at several of the major Hollywood film studios, it is increasingly evident that the film industry’s major players are still struggling to adapt to a marketplace in which premium television, streaming services, and cord-cutting have worked in concert to undercut a business model that has thrived for generations up until this point.

While the major film studios continue to look for new executives capable of finding the solution to Hollywood’s ongoing adaptability issues, Lewis Syring believes the studios might be looking in all the wrong places. In fact, if it were up to Lewis Syring, film studio executives would need look no further than the basic underlying principles of both marketing and storytelling for all the guidance necessary for thriving despite the major upheaval shaking up one of Hollywood’s most storied industries.

Syring, a Los Angeles-area business marketing consultant with an academic background in literature, often references the inimitable and diverse work of Kurt Vonnegut when advising clients. Recognizing that the majority of film studios seem to be focused on how to alter their business model to challenge the growing number of competitors in the industry, the longtime Southern California consultant suggested a different approach based on the storytelling principles outlined by Vonnegut so many years ago.

As part of his University of Chicago master’s thesis -- which was rejected because, according to Vonnegut, “it was so simple and looked like too much fun” -- the icon of contemporary American literature asserted that all stories have eight specific shapes that can be depicted with a simple graph. Identifying eight different story shapes with names like “Man In Hole,” “Boy Meets Girl,” From Bad to Worse,” and “Which Way Is Up?,” Vonnegut could reduce even the most complicated works of literature into a simple graph.

It is Syring’s view that the film industry stands to learn a great deal from Vonnegut’s seemingly simplistic approach to literary structure, particularly since it appears the industry has struggled to address its adaptability issues mainly due to its inability to accurately identify the core problems. As Syring often advises his marketing clients, addressing any complex issue should always begin with an effort revolving around simplification that helps reveal what is actually at the core of a specific problem.

Perhaps the new executives being tapped to take over the leadership positions within the major film studios have already diagnosed the central issues facing the industry and are now in the process of developing the solutions that will ultimately help restore prominence to the most hallowed of Hollywood industries. If they have not yet arrived at a diagnosis, Syring’s suggestion may very well be the key to ensuring the new leadership does not needlessly complicate the ongoing adaptability issue as the competition continues to assert its dominance in an industry that has long belonged to Hollywood.