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.

"Vimal" is back..

Reliance is enjoying the bull run on the stock market and both the brothers together have beaten Bill Gates in market capitalization hands down. But anyways, Mukesh alone has amassed enough wealth to make it to the top 5 league. With Anil not very far behind soon we will hear the adage that "beat one Ambani and meet another Ambani at the top". Though Reliance's story is not a very clean one but still the kind of value they have created for their share holders is amazing. One stock of the group trippled in 3 month time and another grew by more than ten times in one and half years.


Well, the stock story needs a lot of discussion so lets just focus on the brand Vimal or for that matter on "Only Vimal". Reliance Fresh has not gone down well with the small retailers but the format is already a hit and timing was perfectly alright as it would have been difficult to follow Bharti-Walmart in this space. Two things were certain. One that Reliance wants to eat into the retail pie and two that they were really serious about it. Just recently they announced their intentions to enter into health-care retail and now the return of Vimal has been formally announced.

It's no more lonely at the top -
Things surely have changed in all these years since Vimal choose to stay away from market. The focus has shifted from the stitched to ready to wear segment. Even the stitched segment is dominated by brands like Reid and Tailor and Raymonds. The retail scenario has completely changed. Pantaloon Retail with it's multi-format retail ventures is big and booming, Arvind mills is planning their own retail outlets and Mudra Garments is likely to follow the Arvinds in their retail foray. And these two companies together have brands like Lee, Arrow, Levi's, Wrangler, Flying Machine, Van Heusen, Allen Solly, Louis Phillipe, Peter England etc which together accounts for more than half the market of the branded ready to wear (men's) segment and feeling the heat of the growing muscle power of the discount retailers and in-house branding strategy, these manufacturers are planning to enter into the retail sector.

Vimal's makeover -
A contemporary logo (which is not very contemporary), Italian designers to design the ready to wear garments (the irony is that those who are familiar with the designer's name wouldn't buy the Vimal brand and those who are not familiar with the name it doesn't matter to them whether the designs are coming from Italy or elsewhere) and most importantly an enhanced product offering were the part of this makeover exercise. The product offering includes Vimal Red, White and Black ranges. The Reds and Whites are targeted towards value segment (people like me and most of my blog readers) and value conscious segment (bottom of the retail pyramid) and the black will be slightly upmarket offering targeted to eat into the market share of definitely the Madura brands (Allen Solly, Louis Phillipe and Van Heusen).




Name or the nemesis? -
I am not sure that the company is going to launch both the ready to wear as well as ready to stitch fabric under the same brand name. My guesses are that the company is thinking about the same brand name Vimal for all the three segments with the color appended like Vimal Red, Vimal white or Vimal Black. The argument is the 'nostalgia' attached with the brand. My argument against is that though I like Vimal brand and their catchy advertisements of the past but still it could work well against this brand also. After all, who wears a shirt bought by his father? A gift may be yes but if I am supposed to buy for myself, I would still go for Louis Phillipe, Van Heusen or Zodiac. Yeah, the one thing which will work with this name is the large pool of retailers and distributors who will be more than eager to carry this brand. Vimal has old connotation about it and as far as I think, they should go for a branding exercise and should create a few brand extensions on the Vimal Platform. Which I think they will do because Reliance is looking at a long term strategy and they are here to increase their retail foot-prints so sooner or later we will see some brand extensions coming out of the Vimal's stable.

Life is surely tough -
There are several factors which can hinder market adoption of the brand like Vimal. Take the fabric market, the whole space is cluttered with new players like Reid and Tailor, Belmonte, as well as some strong old players like Raymonds, Mayur, Digjam, OCM, Siyaram, Dinesh which all enjoy good recall. Infact, just recently Dinesh and Mayur has started aggressive advertising again. In the ready to wear market, it's fiercely competitive in every segment. The ride ahead is surely bumpy but we all know about Reliance. They are expert in creating a market and growing it. So, lets see.

Brand Ambassadors? Who?
Mayur of course has got the right brand Ambassador in Salman Khan which will go a long way in building on the recall of "Mayur Mayur kya hit, kya fit". Amitabh has been taken already and Belmonte has launched a campaign of BelMonte style Studio with Shah Rukh Khan. Amitabh is already endorsing a brand. Saif is with Provogue. So it seems that Amir is the only good choice left. Let's see what their creative agency has stored in for them.

Creating a brand has become extremely difficult these days. The media is widely fragmented and expensive and even researchers are struggling to find proper ways to measure brand loyalty. Only time can tell that whether Vimal will be able to win it's old consumers back but yeah strategically Vimal's makeover and relaunch is aptly timed.