How Do You Market
a Philosophy?
writing
March 2026
The studio had extraordinary things to show. But what the studio found impressive and what an audience found meaningful turned out to be entirely different things.
4
Currently in production
40+
Total award wins
7
Oscar-nominated productions
21
Productions completed
2003
First production credit
The LAIKA Social Story — and What It Taught Me About Building a Community in Service of Something Bigger
kubothemovie instagram ©LAIKA LLC
Every item. Hand-made. Every one.
There is a scene in Kubo and the Two Strings where the hero approaches an abandoned fortress. The ground is littered with hundreds of spears — the remnants of a battle fought long ago. Most audiences will feel the weight of that moment without knowing why.
What they won't know is that a member of the LAIKA crew taught themselves metallurgy and knife-making specifically to hand-forge every single one of those spears. In miniature. Not props. Not replicas. Hand-forged, at a scale most people's fingers couldn't manage.
CGW - Coraline in 3D article ©LAIKA LLC
In the Coraline sets, an entire orchard of cherry blossom trees was built by hand — wire armatures, mesh, carved foam, silicon, meticulous texturing, and painted pink popcorn for the blossoms themselves. Thousands of individual pieces. For a world shared on screen for a few seconds. Made with the same care as if the audience would examine every branch.
When visitors came to the studio, the reaction was always the same. A kind of overwhelmed silence. Then disbelief. Then something that looked like joy. They weren't just impressed. They were experiencing something they couldn't quite name — the feeling of encountering a place where people cared about things more than seemed entirely reasonable.
That feeling was LAIKA's greatest untapped asset. And it was the beginning of a question that would shape how we built a community — one that could become the bedrock of LAIKA's external brand ambassadors and its most loyal fans.
01
The Question That Started Everything
"If you could bottle that feeling, the films would sell themselves."
Dan Pascall – Marketing Production Manager, LAIKA
When we brought Dan Heale and the Way to Blue team in to help build LAIKA's social presence, one of the first things we did was give them a tour of the studio.
The reaction was the same as always. The scale. The detail. The spears. The popcorn trees. By the end of each tour, Dan Pascall — our Marketing Production Manager — and I would half joke: "if you could bottle that feeling, the films would sell themselves."
The joke became a serious question. What if we could? Not literally — but what if a social strategy could recreate, for someone sitting at home who would never visit Portland, something close to the feeling of walking through that studio?
And then a more important question followed. Does that feeling translate? Does the wonder of encountering this place make someone want to watch the films? If the answer was yes — and we believed it was — how could we use it deliberately, measurably, in service of that goal?
This was, before I had the language for it, the beginning of data-driven decision making and customer journey thinking. Even then I was asking: we think this is impressive and important — but why does the customer care? What does it do for them? What need does it meet?
The studio's sense of its own extraordinariness was not the point. The customer's experience of it was. That single reframe quietly redirected the entire strategy.
02
Dan and his team at Way to Blue understood platforms, audience psychology, and content strategy. What they didn't yet understand was the specific reality of stop-motion production — for a studio that takes weeks or months to plan and execute what is needed to deliver 4 seconds of footage per week, the question of what is possible and what is reasonable is never straightforward. The constraints aren't just creative. They're physical, temporal, and deeply embedded in how the studio operates.
Bridging that gap was the actual work. Any request we made of the production process carried real cost, so we needed feedback loops that could show us what was genuinely engaging and meaningful — and what wasn't worth the disruption.
We tested and iterated. Looking back, this was the beginning of me working in what I'd later recognise as an OKR framework operating in 90-day cycles. Post something. Measure the response. Learn from it. Adjust. Repeat. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Knowing something doesn't work is just as valuable as knowing something does.
And we learned that quickly.
Early on, we made the mistake almost every creative organisation makes. We shared what we found impressive rather than what the audience would find meaningful.
We posted the facts. The number of individual bolts in a character armature. The yards of yarn in a single costume. These things fascinated us — they were evidence of the almost unreasonable care that went into every frame. But the data came back flat. People acknowledged the facts. They didn't feel them.
Then we showed the popcorn trees. The response was in another category entirely.
That taught us the most important lesson of the entire project: there is a fundamental difference between explaining why something is extraordinary and letting someone discover it. The first approach closes the loop — here is the impressive fact, now you know it. The second opens one — here is something, what do you make of it?
Research in social media marketing confirms this pattern systematically — across platforms and industries, entertaining and emotionally resonant content consistently outperforms informational content. The LAIKA data confirmed it post by post.
The studio's instinct is always to explain. The community's need is always to discover.
This matters because in almost every organisation there are voices — well-intentioned, often senior — who believe the answer to audience disconnect is better education. If we explain what we do more clearly, they'll finally understand. If we make the case more compellingly, they'll come around.
The data kept telling us the opposite. Every post that tried to educate underperformed. Every post that trusted the audience to feel something performed beyond expectation. The popcorn trees didn't need a caption explaining the craft. The craft was the caption.
LAIKA Facebook posts ©LAIKA LLC
We encountered the same dynamic with character content. A Mother's Day post featuring Coraline alongside her real mother and the Other Mother worked extraordinarily well — because the tension between those three characters is the emotional core of the film. The holiday gave us a frame. The characters gave it meaning.
Encouraged by that, we tried a Father's Day post — all the father figures from across the LAIKA films gathered around a barbecue, with one of the human dads concerned and confused by the large beetle from Kubo that had joined them. It was genuinely charming. The studio loved it. It performed adequately.
The difference was that one post was found in the emotional truth of specific characters. The other was constructed around a concept that assembled characters from different worlds into a scenario that was fun but not rooted in any of their individual stories. One felt like something that could have happened in the world of the films. The other felt like a marketing decision dressed as a character moment.
We became considerably more careful after that about whose perspective we were designing from — the studio's, or the characters'.
"The studio's instinct is always to explain. The community's need is always to discover."
03
Understanding Who Was Actually There
Through that testing, we discovered that LAIKA's audience wasn't a single community — it was several, each drawn to something different. This is where formal audience profiling became essential. Understanding how different people consume your product — their motivations, their entry points, their relationship with the work — is the foundation of content that actually connects.
Some were there for the purity of the craft. The commitment to creating physical worlds by hand resonated with them at a values level. They cared about how it was made as much as what was made.
Others connected with the characters — more three-dimensional, more emotionally complex than most animation audiences expected. These weren't cartoons. They were people.
A third group were drawn in by the "how did they do that" response. Time-lapse videos showing three weeks of an animator moving a puppet frame by frame to produce ten seconds of footage created a kind of disbelief that translated directly into sharing behaviour.
Each segment needed different content, at different cadences, through different formats. Mapping those segments and building content against each of them was audience profiling in practice — data-driven decision making applied to a creative challenge.
This wasn't a sudden revelation. It was confirmation of what the data had been pointing to consistently. The community we wanted to grow didn't need to be explained to. They needed content, access, and ways to genuinely participate. The customer journey framework we'd been developing told us clearly: people at different stages of their relationship with LAIKA needed different things — and none of them needed us to tell them why our films were extraordinary.
When Kubo received a BAFTA nomination, all three groups responded — but for different reasons. The craft audience felt the technique had been recognised. The character audience felt the storytelling had been honoured. The curiosity audience shared it because it validated what they'd been telling their friends. The engagement felt personal across all three because the connection was real across all three.
The principle that guided every content decision: show, don't tell. Never say it's amazing. Give people enough to let them decide for themselves.
04
Building a Community, Not Just an Audience
Portland Art Museum screening room video ©LAIKA LLC
LAIKA's fans had a role. They had a voice. They were part of the team — people whose passion and pride and sense of ownership over these films was part of what made those films matter in the world.
The strategic question shifted from "how do we reach more people" to "what genuine value can we give the people already here?"
That question — what value can we provide, rather than what can we extract — is one I carry into every conversation about community and content strategy. A transactional approach to community eventually collapses because the community feels it.
Academic research on brand communities consistently shows the same thing: communities built on genuine participation generate trust that transactional audiences simply cannot replicate.
A value-first approach compounds because people return to things that genuinely serve them.
This infrastructure also proved its worth when conditions were difficult. When a film underperformed commercially, the relationships and trust built through years of authentic engagement gave the studio something real to lean on. A community built on genuine connection doesn't disappear when the opening weekend numbers aren't what you hoped. That kind of resilience isn't accidental. It's what you get when you've never treated the community as a means to an end.
"What value can we provide, rather than what can we extract — is one I carry into every conversation about community and content strategy."
05
The Valentine's Day Test
A Valentine's Day post featuring Coraline and Norman together — two characters from two films, sharing the same frame for the first time — required both social media expertise and deep knowledge of the LAIKA world. Neither side could have made that decision alone.
Mixing characters from different films wasn't something we were comfortable with. It required a framework before we could proceed. The characters couldn't behave like actors — that would have felt immediately wrong to fans who knew these films. They had to remain in character. Who they were in the film was who they had to be in the post.
CGW - Coraline in 3D article ©LAIKA LLC
So the question became: how would Coraline and Norman actually interact, given everything we know about who they are? The post became a piece of fan fiction held to the same standard of character integrity as the films themselves. That discipline — staying completely true to who the characters were — was what made it authentic rather than exploitative.
It reached 2.49 million people at 4.58% engagement. Organically. No paid media.
2.49M
People reached by a single organic post. No paid media. Two characters. One frame.
06
Finding Like-Minded Partners
The same principle guided external partnerships.
When Cirque du Soleil came to Portland, we didn't approach them because of their audience size. We approached them because they understood something specific — what it means to bring an ancient, extraordinary craft to people who might never otherwise encounter it. Stop-motion animation is one of the oldest forms of filmmaking. LAIKA was doing things with it that had never been attempted before. Cirque was living a version of the same story with circus arts. (LINK)
nicobaixas.com meeting LAIKA video
The co-branded content that emerged had a shared lens: people who love their craft and find ways to bring it to audiences in new ways. It wasn't a promotional partnership. It was two organisations, built on similar values, finding the overlap between their communities.
We tested this thinking when Hamilton came to town. The partnership had surface logic — cultural phenomenon, passionate fanbase, creative excellence, and the potential to reach people who had never encountered LAIKA before. And it did deliver some of that. But the depth of connection wasn't there. The audiences overlapped demographically but not in the values that drive genuine engagement. It reached further than it resonated.
Which raised a useful question we started applying to every potential partnership: is the juice worth the squeeze? Reach without genuine alignment costs time, creative energy, and organisational attention. The Cirque partnership earned all of that back. The Hamilton experience taught us that cultural heat and audience size are not substitutes for shared values — and that being honest about what a partnership can and can't deliver is itself a form of strategic discipline.
What the Numbers Mean
07
£0
Total paid media spend across the entire community-building programme. Every person reached came through content that earned their attention.
Over six months:
-
212 posts across four legacy film communities
-
152,968 new community members — purely organic, zero paid media
-
32.6 million people reached
-
Engagement rates running consistently at multiples of industry benchmarks
For context: industry benchmark engagement rates for entertainment content typically sit between 1 and 3 percent. The Valentine's Day post alone ran at 4.58 percent. Organically
The numbers matter. But they represent something more important than reach. They represent a community that was being properly served — given content that respected their intelligence, celebrated their connection to the films, and never mistook them for a market to be extracted from.
Fans first. Potential consumers second. Cinema-goers always.
The consumer products division we built alongside this — which grew from zero to nearly $1M in revenue over three years, with 25+ active licensees and 150+ products — worked because the community was real and the trust was genuine. We weren't selling merchandise to an audience. We were giving a community a way to own a piece of the world they already loved. The distinction sounds small. Commercially, it's enormous. *(The full story of how we built that division is in a separate post.)*
Closing Principle
The best results I've seen in my career have come from a consistent pattern: two worlds that don't naturally speak the same language, and someone willing to do the translation work between them.
At LAIKA, one version of that was studio culture meeting social media strategy — the story told here. But it was one of several moments across my career where the same pattern appeared in different forms, different industries, different challenges. The contexts change. The underlying work — finding the common language, building the bridge, holding the tension until it resolves into something neither side could have made alone — stays the same.
The challenge itself is everywhere. How do you share what you make in a way that serves the making, rather than replacing it? How do you build a community that loves your work without turning the work into a vehicle for the community?
The answer, as best I've found it, is to keep the goal in sight at all times. LAIKA was a film studio. Everything else — the social presence, the consumer products, the community, the partnerships — was infrastructure in service of that. When the infrastructure is built around a clear truth, and when the strategy is driven by genuine data about what the audience actually values, the community that forms tends to be real.
We never told people it was amazing. We showed them the popcorn trees. We trusted them to decide.
They did.
The Numbers
32.6M
People reached organically
152,968
Community members built
4.58%
Engagement rate vs
1–3% benchmark
£0
Paid media spend
about the author
Martin Pelham
Senior Marketing & Operations Executive. Warner Bros. LAIKA. Baobab Studios. 20+ years. Six Oscar-nominated productions. One Golden Globe. One BAFTA.
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