'Kaththi' blockbuster movie - Marketing strategies

Kaththi (English: The Knife) is a 2014 Indian Tamil action thriller film written and directed by AR Murugadoss. The film stars Vijay in dual roles while Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Tota Roy Chowdhury and Sathish play supporting roles.This movie although featuring usual horrible first half and interesting second half made lured audience and few critics too.

I am not going to talk about the loopholes in the movie or suggest better way of screenplay or the “movie is already a better movie” justification. All I want to convey through this post is, “This movie is a perfect example or a case study for a management student”. Being a management student myself, I saw the movie in the same perspective, although I am not so good in marketing.

Kaththi had the biggest opening for a South Indian film as on the opening day, the film netted around 125 million (US$2.0 million) in Tamil Nadu alone. Kaththi reached the 1 billion (US$16 million) mark in 12 days of its release. After a long run for 9 weeks at the Chennai box office, the film netted around 78.29 million (US$1.2 million), the second highest figure among Tamil films.

Here are few management principles used by ARM (and his ‘inspired’ team) which made the movie to hit the 100 crore club. - Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning

Let us see the strategy he used in the above three sectors.

Segmenting: 

Market segmentation is an important factor to be seen while selling a product. The director has segmented the audience Geographically, Psychographically and Demographically. As he is going to make the movie exclusive for the Tamil audience his first strategy is to tap the majority of geography. Everybody has a soft corner for their native and when a story is told about one’s native and stories supporting the native villages, then the majority tend to like it. 

Secondly tapping the audiences “Psychographically”- today although many follow the urban lifestyle, everybody misses their native lifestyle tapping that point and criticizing the urban life and brings in those audiences. 

Third is the major part of the strategy, tapping the audiences demographically. Today the major contributors to the game are the multiplexes and the multiplex audiences mainly aged between 25 and 40. Tapping them is to find their most concentrated area – Social issues. Give them a social issue and a platform to express their views and see the effect, which is evident. By integrating all the three strategies he brought a commercial product.

Targeting: 

As stated above the segmented audiences are targeted and all he had to do is give them a glimpse of the reality and some anti-gravity stunts in the frame to keep them engaged and continue his commercial product.

Positioning: 

This is the most crucial part of the marketing of the movie. The movie was well framed to be an out and out commercial one. But rather than positioning it as an entertainer the director had positioned it as a “media-tool” to create social awareness. He made a statement that, as a responsible citizen he has made a movie to show the atrocities of the corporate and the injustice to the rural people, criticizing the media and so on. On the whole he criticizes the corporate society in whatever possible way. This does not even make sense as it is a corporate produced movie against the corporate, and the benefit of the movie is reaped by the corporate. This shows that the director had a clear vision and understanding the audience and positioned in such a way that people believe the way it is positioned rather than what it is actually.

                       

These ingredients are to please the above said segments and targets to make them believe that it is a worthy product and is of their interest. Once audience enter the screen then, all he had to do is to nullify their analytical and logical thinking abilities by distracting them to maximum extent.

In this movie the distraction strategy at first half was Samantha and the so called “love track”, which failed miserably and the strategic ingredients are in the second half was to give an action movie. 

Anirudh’s BGM literally saved the day and beyond the director’s strategy any audience who watches a Vijay movie expects the music to be better. This was perfectly delivered by the young talent, who is now the darling of masses and literally a youth icon. By this way the movie succeeded not only among the Vijay fans and targeted youth but also pleased the critics.

P.S: This post is to show how talented strategist the director is in the sense of STP (Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning not Stealing, Talking and Plagiarizing)

This post was written by Gopalakrishnan , I year PGDM.