“Why Kattappa Killed Baahubali?”
This question shook the entire nation in 2015, as soon as Baahubali-The Beginning released.
I don’t think that there was a single soul in the country who was spared from this massive marketing strategy by the film.
But how did a film became this mammoth of a brand?
Apart from the film being a visual art itself, filled with dance, drama romance & action, the makers invested in an aggressive marketing campaign for the film.
Both of the films were made in the 400-450 crore range, so you can very well imagine the plethora of money the producers spend on promotion & marketing of the franchise?
Major marketing moves
Online Strategy:
Facebook became a major platform of promotion for the team of Baahubali. They started running various campaigns on Facebook including the ‘Baahubali Profile Picture Frame’ contest, some live videos & other interesting tit-bits of the films.
One of the most popular was Baahubali-themed animated stickers inside the FB Messenger app. It was a gem & spiked thousands of downloads within weeks. At present their FB page has over 4.21 million followers & it’s still counting!
Twitter has always been a favorite of any marketing team for movies, the reason being most movie stars & movie lovers are supremely active on this platform.
Baahubali team stirred a huge buzz with many hashtags like #Baahubali, #BaahubaliOnJuly10th, #LiveTheEpic, #ReLiveTheEpic, #Baahubali2, etc.
Their campaign “Baahubali Quest” became extremely popular with #ADayWithBaahubali, which was done to provide lucky tickets urging them to follow the cast & crew of the movie.
Youtube
Comparatively new in the movie promotional game, many Bollywood has started using this platform to unveil their “Making of” & “Behind the scene” videos.
Their snippets of these short videos, promo dialogues, kept the audience on their toes. The inside look of the filmmakers took the audience through a journey, therefore connecting with them personally!
Yes!
They did not leave Whatsapp too!
As a part of their promotional marketing strategy, months before the first movie came out, they announced a unique number where, if followed it would give exclusive updates of the film to their fans who registered on 27th December 2014.
This was a fairly new & innovative marketing plan on behalf of their team.
Game creation
To connect with the young crowds, the team developed a game with Moonfrog studio.
It was another fabulous marketing move! Just think about it. Generally, young crowds are more tech-savvy than elders & they kept engaging their young audience with the game. It generated over 10 million downloads from the Google Play Store with an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars.
Now that we have discussed about the online marketing strategies, let’s have a look at some of the offline marketing approach by the team.
Offline
IPL season launch
Most of the moviemakers avoid the IPL season for their movie launch, but not the Baahubali team!
The used the opportunity & captured the entire single screens for 3 weeks. They used about 1000 hoardings with an average visibility of 5000 per day.
They took a risk but it worked for them & how!
Multi-lingual
The makers did not want to restrict themselves only to regional languages like Tamil or Telugu. To have a nationwide release the film was made in four languages- Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam.
This move was crucial as it made the film widely acceptable to global audiences.
Animation series
Baahubali teamed up with Amazon to create their own animation series before the release of Baahubali: The Conclusion. The series was aired on Amazon Prime with a motive to sustain the movie’s buzz from the first part to the second.
Partnering up with major brands
Nestle, OPPO, Britannia, MacD, Bajaj Almonds Hair Oil, you name it & they are there!
The team incorporated major brands with the movie as a part of their marketing campaign.
Pre-bookings
They tied up with Bookmyshow, Paytm movies and ticknetnew.com and tempted the audience for pre-booking by giving those discounted coupons and other offers. As a result, they had multiple bookings for the same movie.
Outcome
The first movie ended in a major cliffhanger!
The mimic question “Why Kattappa Killed Baahubali?” went viral!
Within no time the hashtag #WKKB was on everyone’s mind, even the ones who somehow had missed the movie!
Every other WhatsApp forward message or Troll pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram had posts/feeds flooded with priceless memes around it, every other day. It made the audience laugh hard till their stomach hurt and this scenario continued for many months ahead.
This made enough buzz for the second part of the movie.
Baahubali: The Beginning garnered around 600 crore worldwide. It topped Google (India) “Trending movie” list in 2015.
And what about Baahubali 2 you may ask?
It had a historic run in the theatres. It became the first Indian movie to gross over 1000 crore in all the languages. And it did that within 10 days of its release!
It broke all the records worldwide & made a benchmark for any further movie franchise to be made in India!
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