Bahubali: The Beginning - Marketing Strategies

Bahubali, The name has crossed the minds every possible moviegoer for the past few weeks. A movie which should have been just yet another south Indian movie has now turned into a national sensation. As a movie it had nothing great in terms of the storyline. But it is exactly the thing that made the movie cross the barriers of language. The movie was made as a bilingual in Tamil and Telugu and has been dubbed in Malayalam and Hindi. The movie has reached the hype it needed through extensive marketing. Let us see how the movie turned from a yet another regional movie into a giant.

Director SS Rajamouli thought of making a large scale historical movie. This movie came after an extensive success of his previous movie Eega which also released in Hindi, dubbed as Makhkhi. The movie got raving reviews for the creativity involved and the director became a person to look after in the Indian scenario. The movie started at 2013 and the shooting went on for two years. As the scale of the project went on the exponential scale the visionary director knew how to deal with it, and how did he! The movie is being watched all over for the vision of the director rather than the storyline.

He started the promotion of the movie right from 2014. The campaign started off with a video on YouTube wishing actress Anushka Shetty on her birthday. This was followed by the birthday wishing videos teasing the movie and the character of Prabhas and Rana. Also they released the videos of one year shooting completion and all of it had created the buzz slowly. The decision to split the movie into two parts must have been taken in the middle, as the budget peaked it was thought that it would be better to make the audience buy the ticket twice. For that the director had to make sure the first part is engaging enough to cater the needs of the masses. He has proved that he caters the need meticulously from his past.

The marketing formed the important part of the project. Apart from the YouTube teasers they also used an application of augmented reality for playing the trailer. Apart from this another major marketing strategy is getting updates through WhatsApp marketing. It is one of the much to notice marketing tool which is not yet used properly by many of the marketers. They owned the channel and to add a cherry on the top they created the biggest poster for a movie and was awarded Guinness award for the same. Each mode of it created the hype it needed to reach the audience.

The most important term they were conscious was in positioning the film. The movie is presented by Dharma Productions in Bollywood and in Tamil it is presented by Studio Green and UV creations. By the help them they got the screens it needed and the tag helped in positioning them better. This move was an important move in terms of the distribution of the movie. Obviously distribution channels play an important role. Especially the Dharma tag brought in a lot of limelight to the project. Along with the advertisement portrayed it as the biggest budget/ most expensive movie ever made in Indian cinema. This created hype and helped in positioning the project crossing the language barrier. Or else the movie could’ve been easily neglected or ignored as a regional cinema.

Now all the hype is set and the question is whether the movie satisfied the hype? The movie totally made the audience go mad over the visuals. The director’s vision is seen clearly through visuals. He took a simple story and filled it with extravagant visuals and strong characters. The movie although being criticized for the racist approach it still holds an entertaining watch. The lead characters hold the screen totally in their hands .Sathyaraj and Ramya Krishnan shines in their roles and elevate the quality of acting in the movie. On the whole when compared to all the recent movies which crossed 100 or so crores this comes way ahead of any of them.

One of the aspects I appreciate the director is that he didn’t relied on the star power as literally none of the actors have a great market to pull big numbers in Bollywood. The makers of the movie didn’t include content just to woo certain audience alone but rather they stayed true to what they promised. In this aspect only it differs from the Chennai express. Chennai express had a ton of product placements, added lungi dance just to get all the Rajni fans to watch the movie. Baahubali did nothing that sort as it might have backfired in this case. They monetized their creative costumes and the sigils they created through merchandizing. Although Chennai express tried and succeeded in the similar saree lines this movie created a perception of uniqueness among the fan boys. Although the success of the merchandise can be seen later only.  

Having said all the above the movie has a weak link in the form of actor Tamanna Bhatia. Her role is still not one of the strong points of the movie. If the director concentrated a bit on the role then the movie had a great chance of achieving more than what it is doing now. And director understood the potential of the film and merchandise has been built.

The lead team of Baahubali, taken initiatives to leverage different marketing channels to distribute their initial content such as movie making and lead stars featured videos to let their potential audience keep engaging with latest updates about the movie, well, it is obviously clear that the penetration of video content through online video networks such as YouTube Video channels will have higher impacting in engagement than the later, which Disney to taken initiative to promote its upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens through operator channels available on YouTube. And, the Baahubali marketing team has taken steps to promote movie on contemporary marketing channels such as making an augmented reality app, movie updates over Whatsapp and utilizing specific public events Comic Con and Cos Play as movie marketing promotions.

With all ingenuity ascribed in the movie and hard work, best of luck to the movie unit and team, with great success and all time records in its kitty. Hope that this film won’t be a standalone film but rather prove to be a new beginning as the title suggests Baahubali – The Beginning.

This post was written by Gopalakrishnan, II year PGDM