Sunday, March 7, 2010

Masters of Marketing

World has become really competitive these days and unless you market yourself you are never going to succeed. Marketing is an art and marketers follow the key message in Gita ‘end results are important and not the ways to reach them’. Nowadays marketing tactics and advertisements are extremely complicated. Unique and innovative ways of marketing were adopted to generate interest for their products/services.

The marketing department of the movie, “”My name is Khan” has definitely succeeded in generating interest in public through a series of cleverly planned ‘real incidents‘ with the back up of our electronic media. The series was kick started by SRK getting ‘detained’ at an American airport and questioned for an hour or two. Then there was another rumour that SRK’s naked scanned images were taken at the airport and those pics were leaked out to public. SRK has to face all these brutalities because his last name - ‘Khan’. News channels broadcasted these as breaking news! We live in a multi lingual, multi religious country which has innumerable social problems which requires immediate attention. However, this is an era of ‘Paid news’ and the concealed ad campaign of SRK’s movie was given preference. Not surprising at all, as the news channels have stooped down to mere advertisement medium for politicians and bollywood.

The massive ad campaign was to promote 2 parties. One is MNIK the movie and the other is Shiv sena, who is desperately trying to regain its lost fame and loosing their ground to another set of goons – the MNS. SRK and Shiv sena clashed through the media and the following words of exchange and public protest ensured to meet the two objectives of the whole campaign.

1) To brand SRK as a powerful person who stood by his principles and thereby promote his movie MNIK, which basically highlights the racial profiling by west.

2) To show the strength of Sena and to show the world that they still have supporters at the root level who can execute Babasaheb’s orders and thereby proving that no security can stop the sena.

We have enough idiots in our country who wasted their precious time watching the WWF match between SRK and Shiv sena. Shiv sena lived up to their name - what more can one expect from the followers of ‘God of destruction’. SRK managed to create curiosity in public and managed to prevent a huge financial burden for his producer who unfortunately financed a ‘hindi forest gump’, where SRK overacted throughout the movie.

The number of film stars in Twitter and blogs has been on the rise, the major objective is to market their new releases and to get public visibility through the medium. The rise of controversies just before and after the release is also very common nowadays. Similar to SRK – Sena drama, the makers of 3 idiots and Chetan Bhagat fought in public. 3 idiots went on to become a huge hit and the sale of Chetan’s book went up by a significant percentage. Classic example of a win-win situation. No points for guessing the real idiots !!!