By now everybody have finished trolling the movie
kaththi, its communism and the great intelligence of the director. 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.
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).
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