Marketing a Movie - Mast hai Bhai

MBA’s love to show off their jargon bank as after all the ‘A’ in the MBA is Attitude only. For me, the jargon of this week is "MaM" and that is the title of this blog. (Wait, you doubt that MaM is just a stupid jargon then hello! tell the same thing to Microsoft people for their new acronym "SaaS" which stands for Software as a Service")

Gone were the days when you just had to announce that the movie stars Amitabh Bachhan or Dilip Kumar or the jubilee star Rajendra Kumar and people will flock to the theatres (even in bullock carts) filling up every inch of available seat. Time has certainly changed. A good product is not at all a good product until it goes all out blowing its own trumpet. The world is surely thankful to the first person who gave this jargon “Marketing”. ( I don’t know exactly who, but some people believe that it was Procter of Procter and Gamble who started marketing his products instead of just selling them).

In recent times, you might have seen captions floating all over TV channels. Captions like “The best movie of the year”, “the top grosser on the first day”, “The biggest movie of the year”, “The biggest movie of all time”, “The first Tamil movie to make it into UK top 10”, “The biggest Hindi movie of the year” and things like that. You just dig a little bit deeper and you will find that most of these captions were just selling gimmicks, just a cheap stunt to market horrible movies. However not all marketing stunts sell because after all every one is not as lucky as Shilpa Shetty.

There were two movies which claimed that they were the biggest movie of the year. Om Shanti Om obviously has still to prove on the box office but yeah they are biggest in star-cast. 31 guest stars appear in the movie for less than 2 minutes each but yeah, it gives the movie a marketing opportunity. The song is only of five minutes duration but just recently a news channel telecasted a 30 minutes show on the making of this one song. Well, the other surprise claimant was Himesh Reshamiya starred “Aap ka Suroor” which claims to be the biggest Hindi movie of the year. I have not met a single friend of mine till now who admitted to have watched this movie. Though I know that some of them have gone to watch but still they are not admitting. If this is some indication then sooner than later his fans will start comparing him to super stars like Rajnikanth.

Talking about Rajnikanth, his movie Shivaji which was released around May end is still ruling the charts in Tamil Nadu. The movie is a very good example of marketing gimmicks where everything about the movie was news. How Rajnikanth got his fair n lovely look, how he in-spite of becoming fifty still manages to fly away the goons all around the place and how the movie was the first Tamil movie to make it into UK top 10. During the same week another movie made it into UP top 10 and that was Jhoom Barabar Jhoom which grossed more than Shivaji during the two weeks it stayed in the UP top 10.

Marketing is becoming very important in movies now. The good thing is that the directors and producers have started understanding and appreciating its importance and it is because of this factor, a whole new economy is coming up. Every other movie has a banking partner, a media partner, an online partner and a logistics partner. Soon tourism companies will get involved and I guess that somebody should talk to Laloo also as he will be the first one to jump into it. “Sab cinema me rail dikhate hain, par railway ko ek paisa nahi milta aur Coca Cola ki ek bottle dikhane ke liye ek lakh lete hain” (nobody pays a penny to railways for using it’s logo in the movies but to show a bottle of coke they charge more than a lakh). The industry is moving in an interesting direction and it makes sense to track the marketing habits of the movies. Today there are two big releases and hope I would be able to post an article about the marketing tricks employed by these two self proclaimed “super-hits”.

Anyways, MaM is not as easy as it sounds. If you doubt, go ask Ram Gopal Varma who is into deep thoughts about how to promote his next ventures. Despite all the brand name and star-cast hoopla, his Sholay flopped like anything. So it’s not as simple as that. Every Friday is not a “good Friday” and every one is not Shilpa Shetty.