Bollywood Global Branding Strategy

GLOBAL BRANDING STRATEGY OF BOLLYWOOD FILMS

This project is submitted to Cass business school as a part of the requirements for the award of MSc Marketing Strategy Innovation. Submitted in: September 2015

Supervised by: Mario Campana

Submitted by: Satvika Modi

ABSTRACT (150)

The aim of this project is to comprehend the pathway to successful global branding building in the world of Indian Cinema. Bollywood is the second largest film industry in the world, churning out ___ blockbusters annually out of which many are distributed globally. This project aims to comprehend the global branding strategy, using

pillania, in his work, (year) shares his views on globalisation of the Indian film industry and its four aspects. The Indian movie industry, called Bollywood, has evolved completely in the last two centuries. The industry has yielded approximately 27,000 feature films and innumerable documented short films. According to research, the export sales of Indian movies were greater than the domestic sales, in the recent past. The Indian movie industry has a noteable presence in the international market since a long time. Globalisation has four aspects, which are, movement of goods, capital, technology and people across borders. The first one is movement of goods. Indian film exports have grown by 60% recently. US and Canada are two major export destinations that account for 30 percent followed by the uk with 25%. Mauritius and Dubai account for 10% each. The other major markets for Bollywood films include Fiji, New Zealand, South Africa, Russia and Australia. Many movies have collected more than 50% of their total gross profit margin from overseas box office proceeds. The second aspect is capital. The Hindi movie industry continuously recieves capital from abroad. For instance, Indian film companies like Adlabs, India Film Company, Eros, and UTV have raised millions of pounds from institutional investors on the aim facility of the LSE (London Stock Exchange). Western film companies are also taking a noteable equity share in such companies (Desai

After a film passes the production stage, it is the marketing and branding that creates awareness and curiosity amongst viewers. Branding strategies of any company have to be strong for it to become globally recognised. Research has been conducted extensively of globalisation of indian cinema and marketing of movies. Saifuddin Ahmed, (2015) states that the upcoming platform to market movies leading to revenue generation is movie websites, Social media, blogs, mobile phones. However nothing is known about the branding strategies of Bollywood movies. For instance Michelle R Nelson and Narayan Devanathan talk about how brand placements in Bollywood movies are becoming popular and how Indians respond to brand placements in a Bollywood film. Bollywood producers are increasingly accepting money from multinational advertisers (Kahn, 2002) like Coca-Cola. Coca Cola reportedly paid Rs. 3.35 crores (US$670000), or approximately 20% of blockbuster Yaadein 's (2001) production costs. (http:// www.mumbai-central.com). Anvita Kumar (2013) also calls brands the new co stars of Bollywood and how films offer screentime to different