Baahubali – A Management Perspective
Baahubali. The name has crossed every possible moviegoer for the past weeks. A movie which should have been yet another south Indian movie have turned into a national sensation. As a movie it had nothing great in terms of storyline. But it is the thing that made the movie cross the barriers of the language. The movie made as a bilingual in Tamil and Telugu and dubbed in Malayalam and Hindi. The movie reached the hype it needed through extensive marketing. Let us see how the movie turned into a big giant.
The director SS Rajamouli thought of making a two part epic. 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 for two years. As the scale of the project went on the exponential scale the visionary director knew how to deal with it. The movie is watched all over for the vision of the director rather than storyline.
He started the promotion of the movie from 2014 itself. The campaign started off with the video on YouTube wishing the actor Prabhas on his birthday. This followed by the birthday wishing videos teasing the movie and the character of Rana, Anushka and so on. Also they released the videos of the shooting completion videos and all of it 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 is better to make the audience buy the ticket twice and for that the director has 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. 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.
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. 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.
p.s: Can’t help that the post also extended a bit lengthy as the movie.
Author Profile
En personal opinion.. kochadaiyaan kuda rajamouliyae direct panirukanum… nalla vanthurukum… tat movie has excelent storyline…
Can’t exactly say that. Kochadaiyaan is entirely different ball game.