How much marketing is too much marketing?

Sudeep’s upcoming film ‘Vikrant Rona’ was launched with a promotional video on the iconic Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai in February this year.

The Malayalam 'The Great Indian Kitchen' was released sans promotion but became a sensational hit due to its quality content and strong word-of-mouth. 

We are living in times where not just the future, but the present too is uncertain. As a result, business models are changing with frugality and economic efficiency, now as the cornerstones. Marketing in any business is a cash-burner and in the context of the film industry, it eats up roughly about 20-30% of a film’s budget.

The marketing conundrum

Today, the audience is deluged by content and marketing is extremely important to spread the word about the film. But that’s not all! After all the buzz, how can one ascertain that the audience will actually watch the film?

If promoted minimally, you are at the risk of not catching enough audience attention. If you go all out, it could burn a big hole in your pocket. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

One size doesn’t fit all

Film promotional activities need to fit well with the size and scope of a film, according to Bharath Sudhama, co-founder of marketing company, ‘The Big Little’. “Films fail in marketing because they are all going for the tried and tested methods and not looking at each film uniquely,” he says.

Film promotions need smart planning so as to ensure the resources invested get converted to ticket sales or online viewership. How often do we come across a campaign like “Why did Kattappa kill Bahubali”, which still remains the holy grail of marketing campaigns? If ‘Baahubali: The Beginning’ deliberately ended at that point with a view of launching this campaign, wouldn’t that make it one of the smartest marketing tricks ever pulled on the audience?

Other big films such as Shankar’s ‘I’, Rajinikanth’s ‘Kabali’ and Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Chennai Express’ were weaker in content but raked in the moolah only due to extravagant marketing. However, there are many cases like Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Zero’, Hrithik Roshan’s ‘Kites’, and Mahesh Babu’s ‘Sypder’, where such extravagance and hype resulted in utter disappointment — both for the audience and the investors alike.

From wall posters to Burj Khalifa

How Dadasaheb Phalke used Gujarati and on-street enactment of a few scenes to promote the first Indian feature film ‘Raja Harischandra’ in Surat is perhaps the first success story in Indian film marketing. Since then, we have seen countless creative ways of marketing films — from pamphlets to newspapers, from PA systems to radio, from TV to social Media, from wall posters to displaying promotional videos on Burj Khalifa like we saw for ‘2.0’ or the more recent ‘Vikrant Rona’ and ‘Navarasa’.

Like in the case of elections, celebrities also peak their on-field interactions with the audience at the time of the release. You see them doing city tours, college visits, press meets, and at times success meets too, well in advance.

The social media bubble

Given that TV promotions were expensive, social media marketing came as a blessing with both accessibility and affordability being its virtues. But, ‘following the template’ is the same trap most fell into with social media as well. You see a zillion variations of YouTube promotions, influencing via memes/troll pages, Twitter and Instagram feeds, and Live sessions on platforms like Facebook. Of late, promoting on Clubhouse has become a trend.

Each and every one of these methods has a cost or requires great time and effort. It is evident that many production houses, regardless of the scale of the movie, have gotten in a marketing rut. They don’t realise that doing more of the same thing may not always yield better results.

My way or the Mallu-way?

Most of recent Malayalam hits are attributed to the content bereft of fancy marketing. Much like their films, they seem to have adopted some sort of minimalism in marketing and seem to be getting the basics right — focus on the content, beyond that, keep calm and believe in word-of-mouth.

‘The Great Indian Kitchen’, which was first rejected by Amazon Prime, was accepted three months later because of the positive feedback it garnered. Most of the lockdown hits in Malayalam took off only post-release.

Over-the-top promotions may ensure success over the first weekend. However, word-of-mouth is still the most reliable mode of promotion. Being smart and appropriate with marketing while investing saved-up resources on the film’s content may be a better choice, both for the brand image and financially.

(The author is a freelancer who writes on film and entertainment)