Introduction
Bollywood has had it great for the last few decades. With no other entertainment option available to the public, movies experienced a golden age, at least commercially, with audiences flocking to the halls over long time spans.
Things are not that rosy now. With the liberalisation in the early 90s, we suddenly saw increased entertainment options apart from Bollywood. Assuming that consumers have fixed amounts of time and resources allocated towards leisure activities, Bollywood is faced with more and more clutter around it.

The rules of the game have changed, and Bollywood practices are changing with it.
The marketing function is not one of simply the “launch planning” of the film, although the launch plan is the most crucial. A well-developed marketing, research and feedback system can be beneficial to a film throughout the entire process of a film - from idea generation all the way to milking the product post-release. However, in this article we will look specifically at the “launch plan” of a film - the most noticed and easily recognised of the tasks - and explore the importance of positioning, targeting and communication during that period.
For a product such as a film, whose success is at least partly defined by peoples’ perception around it, meticulous targeting and proper communication ensures that we say the right things, to the right people, and get more for less.

Zen and the art of marketing movies
In his classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Robert Pirsig tries to deconstruct “Quality” into two components - Rational and emotional quality.
Rational quality is the the quality of a product upon the quality of its components. Hence the rational quality for a movie would be - production house, actors, technicians etc.
Emotional quality constitutes the more intangible aspects of a movie - it’s “look”, the overall idea behind the film and so on.
These two aspects put together give the “perceived quality” of the product. Once the product is consumed, “actual” quality is compared to the earlier perception. The disparity between perceived quality and received quality leads to the level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the film.
Your communication therefore should try to accurately portray the overall quality of your product so as to incite a buy-in, but be sure of being able to deliver on it!

Fighting For Mindspace, Selling Ideas
Typically a film sees the highest viewership and revenue in the opening weekend. This then remains constant, or immediately starts to decline based on word of mouth and its overall “quality” (figure 1). Figure 2 shows the familiar “Product diffusion curve” which illustrates the accepted way a product enters the market.
Intuitively, the curves can be reconciled by extending the film revenue curve backwards. This seems to imply that many people have made their decision to “buy” a film well before its release - the idea of the film has been purchased.
At its core, a film is simply a concept, and its marketing is akin to being a “prototype” of that concept. Like prototypes, movie promos and publicity tries to tell the consumer what sort of quality and attributes the final product will have, and hopefully extracts a “promise to buy”. It competes with prototypes of other films in the customer’s mindspace.
There are two fundamental risks - no one buys into the prototype, or there is a mismatch between the promises of the prototype and the final product, leading to dissatisfaction.
You have two key tasks when creating your prototype: Create a prototype that is exciting enough to get a buy-in, and then deliver on that promise. And just as important as what you’re selling, is who you’re selling it to - hence the importance of proper targeting and communication. Fail to target the right people, and you may not get a buy in at all. Give them the wrong messages, and you may get a buy in, but word-of-mouth will ensure that your film falls flat.

More bang for the buck
When you ask a consumer his hobbies, he never says “Using Soap”. “Watching movies” however, is one of the most common hobbies amongst the populace. People don’t necessarily watch movies because they are “marketed” to them — they watch them for the entertainment value they have.
It hence becomes relatively easy (at least compared to some other product categories) to grab interest - after all, most people are already interested. And, If you can manage to reach that tipping point, from where you can move from “feeding information”, to providing content to a hungry audience, the cost per communication falls as people actively search for information. At that point, media channels start to cover a film, not because of a film’s PR, but because the information is important to their readers. A way of doing this is by ensuring that the right people are getting the right messages.

Hearing it through the Grapevine
Research conducted by the Maritz Marketing Research Group shows that, in Hollywood, 53 per cent of moviegoers decide on the movie they will watch based on recommendations from others. Although there is no clear research for Bollywood, the figure surely indicates that a large proportion of the potential audience will be affected by the opinions of others.
Add to this the popular adage that “nothing travels faster than bad news”, and the fact that the movie viewer is in most cases a GROUP and not an individual, and it becomes apparent how potent word-of-mouth can be.
Proper Communication of a film’s idea serves two equally important purposes - to generate interest, and not to disappoint. After all “expectations reduce joy”, and the wrong expectations can totally backfire against the film.
A case in my experience that used proper communication to create the right expectation was in the case of “Saathiya” - throughout its campaign it was positioned as a “normal, simple, love story”, with the aim to tell people not to expect the world from it. And it worked - people went into the halls and got MORE than they bargained for. This led to positive feedback, and an improved “buzz”.

Targeting the Know-it-alls
There is a very important group who needs to be told about your quality. This group is made of people for whom films are, if not a passion, then at least a preferred hobby. They define themselves and others partially by the depth and recency of their knowledge of Bollywood. We’ve seen such people in our everyday life - not only in films, but in books and music as well.
This is a very important psychographic segment, one that defines the opinions of other around them. In word-of-mouth parlance these people are the “connectors”, the product diffusion curves could call them “innovators/early adopters”, brand managers call them “spokespeople”, I like to think of them as “the know-it-alls”.

Why target them?
Because they are the people who others turn to for information. They are “Disciples” to a credo - and they try to convert people around them to a similar train of thought.
How do we target them?
These are the people who do net searches, troll through Indiafm.com, and are up-to-date with news and gossip - they are the first to get any new information. By making it a little difficult to get information, by “teasing” them a little, by making them find information for themselves, by ensuring that our quality surpasses a “threshold”, we can get these people to work for us. The aim here is to sell the “idea” of the film rather than its specific attributes.
There are some other key sets of people which we need to address - women, for example, who have the power of negating the choice of an entire group, and youngsters (16-26) who make up the bulk of movie goers, and “popular” opinion.

Conclusion
One statement often made is that “this film is for everyone”. Although, ideally, a film is made to appeal to the largest possible audience, it does not take away in anyway the importance of segmenting the audience.
Targeting key psychographic segments can help our communication be accepted faster, while helping create champions for our films. Some other demographic segments (women especially) must also be targeted as they have a lot of say in the consumer behavior of the Group.
Meticulous communication is an opportunity to endow a film with certain attributes hence reducing “risk” to the consumer.
Theatrical release of films now has a shortened life span. Also with the amount of noise and clutter, films lose their “newness”. Correct positioning and communication helps us to maximise earnings throughout the lifecycle of the project, which is carried on to other delivery channels (DVD, TV, etc)