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Marketing and promotion in Bollywood- What’s the paradigm shift?

Marketing and promotions bollywood

The domain of marketing and promotion in Bollywood is one of the biggest sectors in film making world. In fact, with making a movie, only one fourth of job is done, rest of the 75 percent relies on movie promotion and marketing. Without garnering a tangible amount of audience, any movie can be considered as average despite the strong content and good performances in it. In the earlier days, the only source of marketing and promotion was posters and hoardings in different nooks and corners of the town and cities. Those days the actors had the aura that pulled the movies ahead. Later the era of print media and magazines embarked with only one TV channel covering movies once in a blue moon in terms of Chitrahaar or Chayageet. However, today the idea of marketing and promotion has simply improved all these years.

A change in audience

Today, the audience has changed a lot in India and its sub continent in perspective of Indian Cinema. They are now seemed more educated, aware and critical. They now demand to have the value for the entertainment along with variety in today’s films. You cannot fool the audience with a third grade movie. They now want action par with the standard of Hollywood, which the makers of the movie are seen trying with adding new horizons in their efforts. They are seen shifting away from making stereotype movies and now seen moving newer and fresh content. They now want the lead roles should carry out a couple of things. This has therefore made the task of filmmaking very much difficult as the audience today has turned very much ruthless.

Change in format of marketing

As compared to the past, there is a huge amount of difference found in terms of movie promotion. Today, you can find the movie trailer and the songs embarking way before the movie hits the theatre. A good chunk of money is invested in this activity, which is not less than half the budget of the movie. The filmmakers and actors need to learn and master the tricks of marketing from experts and then use them while they promote the movies. The marketing campaign need to catch up the imagination of audience. Every week you can find 3 to 4 releases, well which one are you going to catch? The answer is simple, the one which is among the most marketed one.

The age of instant gratification

We live in the age of instant gratification wherein competition seems to have soared a lot for the filmmakers. The menace of piracy seems to still haunt the filmmakers and you see movies being uploaded on the web, which can be easily downloaded by anyone to watch any movie hitting the same day. Hence at such junctures, the idea of marketing both for the movies and TV shows has to be innovative and unique. In the busy life, catching up the attention of your audience is among the biggest challenge. The audience is very much bored and hence they require a consistent variety of entertainment. The media interviews seems to be very much boring these days even these events need to be interesting wherein the journalist need to pose the right questions before the actors.

Marketing – you cannot take things too lightly

As far as marketing and promotion of the movies is concerned, these cannot be taken lightly. You have examples like Akshay Kumar who left his marketing drives for his movies like – Once upon a Time in Mumbai Dobara and Joker to his team, which has given a bad example in the industry. At times the marketing of even an average product turns out to be profitable. The actors should thus never leave the task to the filmmaker as things can go in a mess for sure. Marketing and promotion is a challenging job, hence the presence of star value in these events do make the difference. Imagine the promotion of the movie Kick without its lead actor Salman Khan, it can be reduced to zero provided Sallu baba is not in the event. Instead of trying 3-4 movies a year with bad promotion than doing 2 movies in a year with effective marketing can lead you more revenue at the end of the day than for the bigger amount of movies in a year.

Wrapping up

In the current tough time, it is really very much important to take up the promotion and training task with added amount of creativity and innovation. These days even the actors are the part and parcel of these marketing and promotional events for their films. It is not about producing any movie but selling out the product that counts after all how well you are able to sell the movie is the key.

Manoj L

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