What makes 'Gully Boy' a marketing case study?

Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt starrer 'Gully Boy' which was released just about a month ago has become a case study of sorts for marketers and MBA grads.

The movie’s catchphrase “Apna Time Ayega” resonated with movie-goers and brands alike, taking on a life of its own on social media timelines, contextual advertising by brands, and achieved peak meme status within days of the song being launched.

From the inception of the movie, the filmmakers had decided to “sell the movie on the proposition of hope,” reveals Vishal Ramchandani, Head of Marketing for Excel Entertainment. The filmmakers were grappling with the public perception of the movie as a ‘musical’ or the ‘next Slumdog Millionaire’ which put the movie in a non-commercial space and were looking for a way to position this movie to appeal to a large audience. “It was conscious effort to keep the proposition as ‘Apna Time Ayega’ because that is highly relatable to our TG - youth,” he says.

And it's to sell this proposition of ‘hope’ that the filmmakers chose to release the trailer for the movie on the first day of the year instead of releasing it alongside Ranveer Singh’s movie Simba that hit theaters on December 28. “Putting the trailer ahead of Simba would have given us immense reach, but we did not take that option because the proposition of ‘Apna Time Ayega’ was central to our promotion. Therefore, we decided to release the trailer on January 1, 2019, to further build the idea for audiences that in 2019 Apna Time Ayega.” Ramchandani believes that while this may seem like a small deviation from the standard operating procedure, it helped cement the emotional connect with audiences.

Earned Media

From this point onwards the meme machine began working overtime giving the movie free earned media. Ramchandani says that while the team and he expected ‘Apna Time Ayega’ to resonate with audiences, the overwhelming response came as a pleasant surprise.

He says that while Excel Entertainment has tied up with influencers in the past for movie promotions, some of the viral content that came out around Gully Boy was not out of a tie-up. Girlyapa’s Gully Bai, a spoof of the movie’s trailer, came out on January 12, which went viral on social media and was one such tribute to the movie. “While we did have plans to work with influencers, when we saw that people were beginning to create content themselves, we decided to let that happen organically,” he adds.