Crowdsourcing: The new business practice in design industry

What’s Crowdsourcing:
                                         
Crowdsourcing is a process helping in distributing problem-solving and production.(15) Also, it involves outsourcing tasks to people around the world occurring both online and offline.Crowdsourcing is similar with Outsourcing but the difference is the "Crowd". That is, the problem is outsourced to an undefined public. The public is also known as the crowd who submits solutions to the problem. Solutions are then owned by the crowdsourcers who broadcast the problem in the first place.

The contributor of the solution is, in some cases, compensated either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. Someone may just want the intellectual satisfaction. And crowdsourcers are motivated by the benefits of crowdsourcing, they can gather large numbers of solutions or information and that it is relative inexpensive to obtain this work.

Background of Crowdsourcing

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) can be one of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing. They made an open call to the community for contributions by having volunteers to index all words in the English language and example quotations for each and everyone of their usages. Within 70 years, they had received over 6 million submissions.

Today, crowdsourcing has transferred mainly to the web. Since individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they can be more comfortable to share ideas, the development of Crowdsourcing can be facilitated. In an online atmosphere, more attention is given to the project or questions rather than communication with other individuals.

Examples:

Threadless.com-- crowdsources its t-shirt designs by having users provide designs and then vote for the ones they like, which are then printed and available for purchase. The company itself has less than 20 employees, yet there are thousands of members who provide designs on them that it can make the products truly created and selected by the crowd, rather than the company.

Minted.com--crowdsources designs for paper goods, like cards, stationary, and calendars in order to sell the most popular ones.

The 2011 documentary Life In a Day --used crowdsourcing to collect video footage from worldwide. Contributors from 192 countries submitted 4,500 hours of video, primarily through YouTube uploads, which the filmmakers edited to 97 minutes in order to create a cohesive documentary.

Past practice: Do the Design in-house or outsource the design  

If a company wanted to innovate and market a new product under its brand, there were two options for them in the past two decades. The first option would be having its own in-house R&D team and production capacity. The second option would be outsourcing the design or manufacturing to vendors. Most of the companies do the product design and development in-house traditionally. However, the product life cycle becomes shorter due to the technological advancement. Globalization also creates fierce competition that marginal products no longer can survive in the market. R&D becomes risky activities. The risk is more obvious when company’s core competency is manufacturing capability, distribution network, marketing expertise or customer services rather than idea generation and product innovation. Besides, design equipment and specialized design skills like styling, simulation, and prototyping is costly for small manufacturers and companies. As a result, more and more companies outsource the product design and development process. 

By outsourcing the product development process, company can enjoy lower development costs due to economies of scale, management and expertise of an experienced Product Development Company (PDC). PDC would design the usability, functionality, performance, safety and compliance of the products according to the quality standards and specifications outlined by the company. It helps company to concentrate on its internal core functions and capabilities. Companies tend to favor outsourcing product design and development if the design is for a low-end product or commodity product. These products do not require in-house designer to create distinctive features and extraordinary product design. Another reason for the emergence of Product Development Company is the information it has. PDC serving in a particular geographical market/region have law knowledge such as product safety and environmental requirement than foreign company does. PDC provides assurance for products to meet legal, demographic and geographic requirement. It could improve the success rate of the product.  

However, there are drawbacks in outsourcing the product design and development process. PDC may provide distinctive features and extraordinary product design that does not fit with brand perception, impressions and feelings occupied in customers’ mind. It would dilute its market positioning. Also, PDC are the technical specialists in design industry but not the expert in understanding and serving customers’ needs. Products are less customer-centric. Companies are switching to a new practice called crowdsourcing. It could overcome the pitfalls of outsourcing. It makes product design and development process inexpensive and improve customer acceptance before commercialization.

Global force and international contexts influencing the new practice

There are some global forces and international context affecting the changes. They include technology advance, workforce diversification, new form of creativity management, customer orientation. 

Technology advance

Technology advance causes the changes in design industry. In design industry, talent employees are the most valuable asset as the companies rely on them to produce creative design. Therefore, seeking talent employees to work for their own company is important. However, due to geographical constraint, the company can reach a limited number of qualified employees as the low mobility of workers. In addition, without advanced technology, the company used traditional methods to hire employees such as posting job advertisement on newspapers, magazines etc.  

Fortunately, thanks to the advanced technology, companies are able to do recruitment online. Online recruitment brings lots of advantages. For example, it allows the companies to reach an unlimited number of candidates from all over the world. It shortens the time of receiving responses from applicants. Online application is convenient as candidates could send resume and cover letter via email. Crowd sourcing is similar to online recruitment but it is more cost effective as the companies do not have to spend money on having employee selection and hiring large number of designers. A company can announce their upcoming design projects online and any interested person can do the design and send the design to the company. Without technology, it is difficult for the companies to use crowdsourcing as it is difficult for them to reach those interested person. 

Understanding the importance of having workforce diversification 

Another force causing crowdsourcing is the trend of workforce diversification. Nowadays, many companies understand a more diversifed workforce will increase organization effectiveness.(David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely, 1996) Having a diversified workforce is beneficial to their business as different kinds of people have their own strengths and weaknesses. Working with different people could make use of different people’s strengths and overcome others’ weaknesses. Also, with different culture background and personality, they think in different ways. Having various thinking is important especially in design industry which requires creativity. Therefore, let the company becomes more diversified brings more advantages than disadvantages once company understand how to manage diversified workforce. After realizing the benefits of having diversified workforce, many companies try to hire different countries people to be their employees. However, recruiting various kinds of employees is very costly as the companies have to spend lots of time on attracting them and it is impossible for the company to hire large amount of employees with limited resources and capital.

 

Then, crowdsourcing is an easier and more economic way to get diversified workforce. Since crowdsourcing allows the company to seek help from anyone online, it is possible to have different nationalities, personalities and characteristics people. By gathering designs from various people, the company can find the best design. And the companies could save a lot of cost because it only has to pay for the winning products. That is why crowdsourcing become popular nowadays. 

Changes in creativity management
Apart from that, new thought in creativity management also favors the emergence of crowdsourcing. Nowadays, to motivate workers to be more creative, giving them intrinsic motivation is better than monetary reward. It is because creative people love challenge. An information Week survey of tens of thousands of IT workers ranks on the job challenge above salary and other financial incentive. (Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight, 2005)Also, they would like their creativity to be appreciated by others. Therefore, crowdsourcing is an excellent way to motivate creative people.

Even though solely the one who wins the project could earn some monetary reward, it could attract a lot of creative people to participate in it because they could have an opportunity to involve in a challenging design project. The challenging project motivates them to perform better as they love challenge. Also, the recognition of being the champion is another intrinsic motivation. As a result, with crowdsourcing, the companies could reduce cost because they spend less money on selecting and recruiting creative employees while successfully attract creative people from all over the world to offer the companies creative design products. Further, it solves the problem that the limited amount of inhouse designers may always encounter bottleneck when designing for difficult project.

Customer orientation

Customer orientation is another force attributing to crowdsourcing. As the global living standard increases, people require better life. When customers go shopping, they want to choose the best. A research shows that rigid design system and excessive specialization are no longer responsive enough to meet rapidly changing customer demand.(Chun Hsien Chen, 2006) That is why companies nowadays spend more capital to understand customers need in order to tailor made products and be more flexible.

It also influences design industry. In the past, designers designed what they think are the best. Now, they have to design what the customers think are the best. However, it is difficult for companies to understand customers’ need entirely even though they spend huge amount of money to hire specialist like market research firms to do the research, it is impossible to thoroughly understand the customers from all over the world.

Crowdsourcing is helpful to produce designs which are customer orientated and it is flexible. It is because a lot of participants of crowdsourcing themselves are the customers. Besides those who are interested in design, customers are engaged in participation either as they have the opportunity to reflect their opinions toward the company via their designs. Giving opinion verbally is not persuasive. Nevertheless, they could design the products by themselves and show the company that their opinions are useful and valuable. As a result, crowdsourcing could help the company to understand customers need and tailor made design for customers as customers are the one who do the design.

New Business Practices--CrowdsourcingBecause of the international contexts change, nowadays there is a steadily growth of MNCs adopt crowdsourcing, which relies on user-generated content(10), as their new business practice in the design prospective. MNCs normally adopt the new practices in two basic models: corporate crowdsourcing and crowdsourcing venders.(7) In the following, we will use several successful examples for illustration.



Corporate crowdsourcing
Corporate crowdsourcing happens when crowdsourcing is started by a company. Lego is totally a representative among toy industry. Lego first introduced a pilot scheme, which is an crowdsourcing collaboration with LEGO^® CUUSOO, in Japan in 2008.(2) The system allows Lego fans to share their ideas or create a project of a good Lego design. Then the design will be voted by other users. Once an idea is supported by 10,000 supporters, it will be reviewed by Lego and evaluated by professional Lego-ers for a chance to become a Lego official product. If their “wish” comes true, the idea will turn into production and the designer will be given a whopping of 1% of total net sales of the product. (1) 

Lego’s crowdsourcing not only generate creative community and talents from the internet for the product innovation, but also let the crowd to assess whether those ideas are popular or implementable or not. At the same time, Lego have set up some project guidelines and house rules for better talent management. LEGO^® CUUSOO is so successful that they are now producing the third LEGO^® CUUSOO product!

Among household enterprises, the Japanese lifestyle brand Muji, just like the Asian Version of IKEA, is also following the new trend of practice – crowdsourcing. Muji operates 440 stores across the US, Europe and Asia.(6) It launched the crowdsourcing practice through community website - Muji.net so as to gather innovative product ideas. After submitting the product designs by the crowd, Muji test the popularity of designs by allowing customers to pre-order products and pre-evaluate by their members. If they receive over 300 pre-orders, it will go into manufacturing and will be available to sell online and global retail stores eventually.(4) Muji changes product innovation direction from product-oriented to customer-oriented. A new type of relationship between customer and advertiser can be created through crowdsourcing.

P&G, which provides diversified branded consumer products and services, is also a successful example.(8) It relied on their own talents and capabilities for generating, developing and delivering new ideas in the past. However, the CEO A.G. Lafley started introducing Connect + Develop in 2000. Everybody around the world can submit your innovation through Connect + Develop website if your ideas meet one of P&G’s criteria. In fact, P&G has about 1.5 million professionals who can be leveraged. It has already successfully resulted in more than 1000 active agreement under the Connect + Develop strategy. Compared with 15% in 2000, 35% of products have elements that originate from outside.(7) Thus, crowdsourcing strategy creates breakthrough for P&G in doing business.

Crowdsourcing venders

Apart corporate crowdsourcing, there is also crowdsourcing vendors which business model is built on crowdsourcing entirely.

In the fashion industry, Hipster clothing company Threadless.com (3), which prints and sells t-shirts designed by people on its Web site, is a famous crowdsourcing example. Threadless launched Artist Programs which allows people to submit their T-shirt designs online and netizen may evaluate them by giving score. Each week, company receives hundreds of design, the top 4-6 highest-rated designs will be produced once they have got enough pre-order from customers and the winners can obtain attractive cash.(5) The more attractive thing is they will put designer's name on the label of each shirt, the social value or reputation is an important reward for participating in open-source projects(11) and it is the main reason that makes Threadless.com success.

Besides, the Mechanical Turk, which was launched by Amazon, acts as an intermediary to give a platform for those companies which require doing simple crowdsourcing. At the same time, people can be a Mechanical Turk Workers and work on human intelligence tasks (HITs) from the website so as to earn money.(9) This is an example of intermediaries of microtasks crowdsourcing.

Conclusion

As Crowdsourcing can bring more benefits to the business so that it is being more popular in different industries especially in the design industry and online commercial. It is not only creates more opportunities for everyone around the world who want to participate into the business event, but also helps the designers to have more ideas about their products. Thus, Crowdsourcing plays an important role to our work as it can gather much more information from the public.

References

(1) What is LEGO CUUSOO. (2012). LEGO Group. Retrieved March 26, 2012 from http://lego.cuusoo.com/#

(2) Lego Crowdsourcing. (2011). Innovators. Retrieved March 26, 2012 from http://www.innovatrs.com/blog/lego-crowdsourcing/

(3)  Alec Perkins. (2007). Crowdsourcing, Evolutionary Design, Their Combination and Implication.

(4)  Harry Gayner. (N.A.). Crowdsourcing. Contagious.

(5) Pual Boution. (2006) Crowdsourcing: Consumer as Creators. Bloomberg. Retrieved March 27, 2012 from http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2006/id20060713_755844.htm

(6) James. (2010). The Beauty if Crowdsourcing. Blur Group. Retrieved March 26, 2012 from http://www.blurgroup.com/blog/the-beauty-of-crowdsourcing-muji

(7) Crowdsourcing. (2011). Universita Bocconi. Retrieved March 27, 2012 from http://www.slideshare.net/TheBlogTV/introduction-to-crowdsourcing

(8) What is Connect + Develop?. (2012) Proctor & Gamble. Retrieved March 27, 2012 from https://secure3.verticali.net/pg-connection-portal/ctx/noauth/0_0_1_4_83_4_3.do

(9) Amazon Mechanical Turk. (2012). Amazon.com. Retrieved March 27, 2012 from https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

(10) Crowdsourcing. (N.A.). Retrieved March 26, 2012 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

(11) M.L. Markus, B. Manville & C.E. Agres. What Makes a Virtual Organization Work? (2000). Sloan Management Review Association.

(12) Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight. (July-August 2005) . Managing for Creativity. Harvard Business Review. 124-131

(13) David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely (Sept-Oct 1996) .  Making Differences matter: A new Paradigm for managing diversity. Harvard Business Review. 79

(14) Chun Hsien Chen. 2006. Trends and Research Issues in Customer Oriented Product Conceptualization. Retrieved from http://ir.lib.cyut.edu.tw:8080/bitstream/310901800/9225/1/6.87-106.pdf
(15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing 

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"Small Budget, Big Success" in HK Movie Industry

1. Overview on movie industry

Our “global indicator” is the number of small budget film can go into the global market successfully. Moreover, we can further discuss how the changes in strategy of production, marketing and distribution can lead to success.

The film producer is involved in the creation and distribution of films as a product. This industry is a worldwide phenomenon, but some countries, like Hollywood in USA have a greater role in production than others. This industry generally employs a wide number of people directly through production and distribution process, and it also employs a large number of people indirectly because of the money spent to produce films. In most cases, the film industry is focused on films as a medium for entertainment, but in some situations, it may use film for educational purposes as well.

The people in charge of the film industry in the area of finance and marketing are generally the film producers. These people arrange funding to create the film and oversee the hiring of talent to create the product. Distribution and marketing are also important factors that determine the success of a film. Different producers have different levels of power. Some simply aid in financing and may have very little to do with the actual creation of a film, while others take a much more significant role in the process. Sometimes films have several different producers although usually only one or two will actually have any real involvement.

We chose film market as the “global indicator” because we found that the on-going technological convergence lead to the decreasing usage of cinemas. So the production companies and distributors both have to adapt the new concept and idea around the film market over the world. They changed to focus more on the scenario and the script to promote their local culture that may lead them to the global market.

"Box office miracle"－Infernal Affairs

We focus on one of the “small budget, big success” films from our local market - “Infernal Affairs (無間道)” as our example.

Infernal Affairs is a 2002 Hong Kong crime-thriller film directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. It tells the story of a police officer who infiltrates the triads, and a police officer secretly working for the same gang. The English title is a word play combining the law enforcement term "internal affairs" with the adjective infernal. The box office is around 55millions HK dollar. Due to its commercial and critical success, Infernal Affairs was followed by a prequel, Infernal Affairs II, and a sequel, Infernal Affairs III, both released in 2003, as well as a 2006 American remake.

Pre-release publicity for Infernal Affairs focused on its star-studded cast (Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang, Kelly Chen and Sammi Cheng), but it later received critical acclaim for its original plot and its concise and swift storytelling style. The film did exceptionally well in Hong Kong, where it was considered "a box office miracle" and heralded as a revival of Hong Kong cinema.

Successful cases of '' small budget, big success'' films in past decade:

Film name	Actor	Box office (HKD)
Shaolin Soccer (2001)	Stephen Chow, Vicki Zhao	60 millions
Kung Fu Hustle (2004)	Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah	59 millions
Police Story 4 : First Strike	Jakie Chan	58 millions
God of Gamblers Returns	Chow Yun-fat, Wu Chien-Lien	52 millions
CJ7 (2008)	Stephen Chow, Zhang Yuqi	51 millions
You Are The Apple of My Eye (2011)	Ko Chen-tung, Michelle Chen	50 millions
Ip Man (2008)	Donnie Yen, Simon Yam	25 millions

2.Changes in strategies－an overview

To make a successful film with limited budget, there are changes in production, distribution, and marketing strategies.

Production strategy changes:
For production strategies, it includes lots of elements like director who is responsible for managing the whole film production, casting selection, location for shooting, and last but not least the film scripts itself. (Filmmaking from wiki, n.d.)

In the past, film producers thought that in order to make their films successful in global market, visual effect is the most important as it can attract people at the first glance. As a result, film producers inclined to spend most of their budget in creating fantastic scene, like action scene, as their first priority. In the next place, they would select actors who are very well known even though with limited budget. Therefore, they would eventually forget the soul of a film, which is the movie script itself. However, they forgot that with the limited budget, it is difficult to make visual effect better than Hollywood’s film as they have huge capital. As a result, the films will be inferior if they only focus on visual effect and casting selection.

Fortunately, the local film producer finally realized that if they want to go into global market, they should make something different from the Hollywood’s instead of trying to copy what the Hollywood films are now doing. That is making a totally new and fresh film plot to inspire people all over the world. Creating a new and special film script is not so costly. The most essential thing you need is creativity.

To succeed, film producers try to create film script with local culture which is new and fresh to global audience. According to the a research paper (rethinking globalization,2009), in order to make globalization successful, sometimes, it is important to keep your own culture instead of having localization because whether having localization depends on competition, context, culture etc. (rethinking globalization, 2009)For film market, keeping own culture is essential because audiences like to see something different from them. That is why the martial art film is particular successful in global market as martial art is the unique culture of Chinese. Additionally, an entirely new idea can also get a competitive advantage because people have never seen similar films before and therefore they are curious about it.

Distribution strategy changes:For film distribution strategy, film used to first appear in local cinema and appeared in foreign countries’ cinema after a long period of time due to the geographical and communication barrier. At the time that the film could finally appear in global cinemas, people who originally want to watch the film might already loss the desire of watching it. Also, it is difficult to acquire the foreign film in audio shop. Nevertheless, thanks to the technology advances, the film producers can shorten the time it takes to bring their film to cinema worldwide by convenience communication and negotiation with the foreign countries’ cinema like having video conferencing. Besides, the channel to distribute film increases. They can make their film DVD available to global audience by purchasing online. Also, the technology advance reduces the cost to do distribution so it allows film producer to distribute their film in a larger scale compared with the past.

Marketing strategy changes:

As far as marketing strategy is concerned, the old marketing strategy is totally different from the current one. In the past, film producer mainly marketed their film by promoting film on television. Now, again thanks to the technology development, film producers think of new way to promote their film.

With the convenience of internet, film producers could simply post their trailer online and make an official website for introducing their film in different languages so that different countries’ web users can approach to it. Also, film makers could make use of the power of the internet to promote their film since people who watched the film are willing to share their comment through discussing in web forum. Besides, technological advance, the trend of globalization encourages more international film festivals which provide opportunities for local film to participate in global market. Not saying having award, being nominated is already a good promotion.

3.Example－ Internal Affairs

After having a brief idea of the changes of strategies in production, distribution and marketing, we are going to use a successful film to illustrate the new kinds of strategies, which is Internal Affairs.

Production strategy－ Paying effort on film script:In terms of production, Internal Affairs has an attractive film script directed by Andrew Lau Wai Keung and Alan Mak Siu Fai. The story is about the local culture in Hong Kong. Being a pure local film, all the scenes are shot in Hong Kong including many local features like actors saying special local slang. Also, the story is based on Hong Kong current situation. In Hong Kong, it is common that there is undercover who lurk in gangland but secretly work for police to collect evidence to reduce crime.

Besides the local culture element, the directors made use of their imagination and creativity adding a new idea into the film. Besides polices pretend to be gang, the gangs lurk in police station too. Since we do not know who is the real police and who is the gang, there is suspense. This made the story become more complex but attractive. Additionally, the story is meaningful because it provides people room to have reflection. In the reality, there is no absolute black and white. There is always some grey area which means whether things are right or wrong depends on the angles we take. Therefore, it creates constructive controversy and makes the film become more popular. All these elements in the script can arouse audience interest. On one hand, the unique culture attracts people curiosity. On the other hand, the meaningful story allow audience to participate in the film in the sense of thinking about the meaning and guessing the development of the story. It could eliminate the disadvantages that people lack participation because they do not understand the unique culture.

With an excellent film script, the producers did not use some expensive visual effect like explosion or exaggerated action scene (Internal Affairs message: importance of film script, n.d), which is commonly used in Hollywood film, to attract global audiences. In short, all local movies succeeded in global market, film makers have put more effort on the film script (story plot) instead of spending money to play special visual effect and casting selection.

Distribution Strategy

Synchronizing released date:

One of the successful tools is to make the movie available to watch for the audiences around the world. As we know that the released date is an important strategy to promote the movie in order to make a profit. The first 'Infernal Affairs' was released in HK2002. With a good box office record, it had been distributed to a lot of countries within following 2 years. People around the world had a chance to watch this film, at the same time, more country distribution helped to enhance its popularity. There is the list of the released date in different countries:

 

Country	Date
Hong Kong	12 December 2002
Taiwan	13 December 2002
South Korea	21 February 2003
France	15 March 2003
Italy	24 April 2003
Philippines	12 August 2003
Greece	18 September 2003
Finland	10 October 2003
Japan	11 October 2003
Ireland	16 October 2003
Norway	16 October 2003
Sweden	November 2003
Australia	1 January 2004
Hungery	19 January 2004
Portugal	5 February 2004
Romania	20 February 2004
UK	27 February 2004
Denmark	29 March 2004
Estonia	21 May 2004
Germany	12 August 2004
Netherlands	9 September 2004
USA	24 september 2004
Belgium	8 December 2004

Online DVD rental service enhance globalization:

After an additional number of months, the movie was released to DAD, VCD and even online rental service. People can buy the videos and watch the film from the internet other than shopping in the VCD shops. The online DVD rental industry is driving movie rental services, with changing customer preferences, demand is shifting towards digital movie rental market. Meanwhile, online DVD rental service plays an important role to make the movie into global market as people around the world can shop on the online shops. There are a lot of internet shops which we can purchase 'Infernal Affairs' video:

easyCinema.com

blockbuster.com

SEVENTYMM.com

LOVEFiLM.com

BARNES&NOBLE.com

Dvd-subtitles.com

Netflix.com

Tesco Entertainment

Amazon.com

Marketing Strategy－Various Media Channels:

In the past, except Hollywood films, it is difficult to promote a movie in global market, let alone a small budget Hong Kong local film. However, in the 21st century, because of the technological advance, ‘Infernal Affairs’ was promoted in diversified ways.

Before promoting ‘Infernal Affairs’ to oversea market, it has already been realized as one of the most successful Asia films worldwide at that time. Why? Due to the technological development, it encourages the globalization of communication. (No author, 1998) John Chong Ching, who was the producer and marketing director of ‘Infernal Affairs’, shared his feeling on the CEBD, said ‘Different from ten years ago, thanks to the technological advance, after seizing the excellent box office on the premiere of “Infernal Affairs’ in Hong Kong, the universal recognized this movie right away. It helped the overseas promotion a lot.’ (Chong Ching, 2003) It reveals that the new information technologies help to reduce the cost of promotion and communication. The global communication facilities, especially the Internet, have the power to move low cost production film ‘Infernal Affairs’ visible from Hong Kong to the global arena and gather support for issue worldwide. (No author, 1998)

In fact, some of the social networking sites and tools were platforms of creating noise and discussions among ‘Infernal Affairs’, which was also one of the changes of marketing strategies. For example, some netizens share the movie trailers with different language versions on Youtube. People from all round the world could watch it and made comments to it. Besides, the MSN could be used as a tool for communicating about the film. Thus, those social networking tools caused the changes of market strategy and supported the low cost Hong Kong film ‘Infernal Affairs’ to gain high reputation worldwide.

 

 (English Version)

(German Version)

Other than using the Internet as media of promotion, the marketing team still using traditional promotion campaigns to consolidate the marketing strategy. First, they produced posters with different languages, such as Korean, Italian, English, French and so on. Besides, the main actors and actress went overseas for instance, Korea and Japan to promote the movie. Thus, in the 21st century, it tends to have more diversified marketing strategies and channels for small budget film like ‘Infernal Affairs’ to move to global market place.

The Power of Word-of-Mouth:
Traditionally, many Hollywood movie distributors invest in expensive global marketing campaigns by placing ads on TV commercials, newspaper ads, theaters, and promotional tour to maximize film publicity and revenue early in the release cycle. The casts, director, visual effects and cinematography, are highlighted in the ads to generate noise and audience interest.

Word-of-mouth also plays a significant role in a movie’s success. Consumers may seek signals of quality in advance of watching, such as critic’s review, comments from online social communities, and word of mouth from friends. (Duan, Wenjing, Gu, Bin and Whinston, Andrew B., 2011)Online WOM in the movie industry takes many forms, including online reviews, discussion boards, and blogs. IMDB.com, and Yahoo! Movie discussion are popular online platforms for moviegoers to post reviews, online ratings and search for film showtime. It is reported by a survey in the Wall Street Journal that a third of moviegoers chose a film because of a favorable review (Simmons [1994]).

To put ‘Infernal Affairs’ to International Stages, it emphasizes on the extensive use of WOM marketing strategies. However, independent online user reviews are of uncertain quality. There is great variety among reviewer’s taste and independent judgment about the quality of the movie. Film critics, who have established high-quality reputations, to exert the most influence on audience decisions. ‘Infernal Affairs’ put its focus on using online film critics review in foreign markets. ‘Infernal Affairs’ was usually first shown in International Film festival in different countries like Milwaukee International Film Festival in USA and Deauville Asian Film Festival. These festivals invite lots of local film critics who write film review and film periodicals to participate. Fortunately, review of ‘Infernal Affairs’ has around 150 expert reviews in many popular printed and online media worldwide. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338564/externalreviews) For instance, the film reviews include Elvis Mitchell(2003), FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW: Loyalty and Betrayal, With Two Detectives Steeped in Corruption. The New York Times. Roger Ebert(2004), Infernal Affairs. Chicago Sun-Times. And G. Allen Johnson (2005) , Good guy, bad guy -- who's who? . San Francisco Chronicle. Their reviews serve as a consumer guide to movies. With their endorsement, ‘Infernal Affairs’ has already aroused the audience interest and favor before the release of the film. Hence, it finally achieves satisfactory box office revenue and was dominated in film awards in oversea countries.

Increasing realizations in International Film Festivals:
Apart from the promotion strategies above, anticipating in international film festivals is an important indicator of the marketing strategy change. It is hard to mention a small budget Hong Kong film that could get rewards o
r take part in the international film festival in the past. However, in the 21st century, much more Hong Kong films, such as ‘Echoes of the Rainbow’ (Echoes of the Rainbow from wiki, n.d.) and ‘A Simple Life’ (A Simple Life from wiki, n.d) are nominated or rewarded in international film festival.

‘Infernal Affairs’ won the Audience Award in 2003 Far East Film Festival, the Audience Award in 40th Annual Golden Horse Awards and the Best Foreign Language Film in 2004 Blue Ribbon Awards. Also, it was screened in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. No matter the film was just nominated or won a reward; it increases the reputation around the world. (Infernal Affairs from wikipedia, n.d) Due to the successful result overseas, the foreign distributors were more interested in buying ‘Infernal Affairs’. As a result, much more global citizen recognized and US buyer even remade this movie. (G. Allen Johnson, 2005) Therefore, the raise of realizations in international film festivals is a force pushing the ‘Infernal Affairs’, the small budget local firm to the international.

4.Conclusion
‘Infernal Affairs’ is a good example to illustrate the changes of production, distribution and marketing strategies of small budget Hong Kong movie respectively. It proofs the strategy changes of small budget Hong Kong films leads to great success is a global indicators.

Extension section

It is an extension section to reply your comments. First of all, our team is very pleased that all of you leaf us meaningful comments. After reading all your comments, we would like to make further explanation.

Many of you mentioned that technology also brings disadvantages like illegal downloading which will negatively influence the whole film industry. Our team admits that there are disadvantages. However, we should not deny the advantages that technology brings to the small budget film. In reality, nothing is perfect. All the things have their own strengths and weaknesses. Our team think that even though disadvantages exist, there are more advantages than disadvantages and technology which does really contribute a lot on success of small budget films. As our team mentioned in the blog, the advantages, like allowing film advertisement to appear in all over the world, shortening time to let the films to be shown in global cinema etc, are really important for small budget film to go globally.

In addition, different parties are engaging in eliminating the illegal downloading problems. For example, WinMx used to be a famous sharing software allowing computer users to share and download songs, movies etc. To restrict illegal downloading, a USA company said they would sue WinMx unless the WinMx adds filter function into the software so that people cannot search products with patent and copy right or suit down. Finally, WinMx shut down their company. And Hong Kong government said after WinMix shut down, the illegal downloading reduced by 80%. (News DJ.com, 2005) It shows that the situation is getting improved even though it is slow. Also, our team think that in the future as the technology goes on improving, the problem will be relieved. For example, illegal downloading could be detected by software and blocked. From the above example, it evident that disadvantages of technology is smaller than advantages.

Regarding Hollywood films can show globalization better than small budget films, our team is not agree with it because small budget films can show greater power of globalization. For Hollywood films, they have put a lot of money and resources into the production, marketing and distribution. It is reasonable that they can get into the global market. Even though globalization is not so significant, Hollywood films still can get into global market easily. However, it is mainly due to their huge money and resources spent. On the contrary, using small budget films to be the indicator is more suitable because the small budget films would not have been so success if globalization is not significant. Imagine that one clever boy and stupid boy go to a tutorial school. If the clever boy gets good academic result, people will just think that it is because he is clever even though the tutorial school has helped too. However, if the stupid boy gets good academic result, people will think that it is mainly because the tutorial school is helpful. There is similar situation in film market. Small budget films can better show the powerfulness of globalization. That is why we choose to analyze small budget film but not Hollywood films.

In addition, we would also respond to the question that whether technology helps to promote film internationally or globalization opens up the world eyes and ears to be interested in the local films. Our team thinks that both of them are right. We believe that both emerged simultaneously. Instead of one leads to another one, we think that they are correlated but not in cause and effect relationship. Indeed, you could say that the promotion of film let the global audience to have a chance to try the local film. On the other hand, the higher level of interest in local film encourages the local film maker to produce more and promote more. They are influencing each other.

In conclusion, once again, we appreciate all of your critical and helpful comment. It is hoped that the above session can let you have more understanding about our blog.

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