A spirits company has created an entire film around its tagline, but how viable is this proposition?
It’s Tuesday, 5:40 pm at PVR Select City Walk at Saket in Delhi. The evening show of Men Will Be Men opens to mostly empty seats. A handful of young men and women have turned up to watch the movie. The “free small combo” of Pepsi and popcorn with every ticket hasn’t quite succeeded in attracting the crowds. Ten minutes into the movie, which has four colleagues — two bachelors, one married and another engaged — hoodwinking their boss to head for Pattaya, and the audience is already getting restless. The next 70 minutes (the short duration of the film) fly by in a daze. Through them, the audience tries hard to follow the movie, a comic caper which at times does elicit laughter, but the comments in the end as people troop out of the hall say it all. “What were they thinking?” remarks one. Another laughs, “What a waste!”
It’s evident that Men Will Be Men hasn’t quite made an impression. But then, Men Will Be Men is not just a regular feature film. It’s a marketing experiment conducted for the first time by a company — spirits-maker Pernod Ricard India. “Men will be Men” is the tagline of its brand Seagram’s Imperial Blue whisky. “The entire film has been created around this tagline,” says its director, Gorky. The idea is simple, almost clichéd, admits Gorky, who is a first-time director (before this, he assisted director-writer Kundan Shah for five years). Four men, working in the same office, are looking for something to break the monotony. A spontaneous decision takes them to Pattaya where they do all the things the tagline “men will be men” could expect them to do — have fun, lounge on the Thailand beach, chase a girl and, yes, bond over glasses of Imperial Blue whisky.
Only they never call the brand by its name in the film. Instead, they call it “IB”. “Imperial Blue is popularly referred to as IB by its consumers,” explains Bikram Basu, vice-president (marketing), Pernod Ricard India. “We felt that a strong idea push, relatable to consumers [and] delivered through a movie, will be great. We know the passion that we have for movies as a nation,” he adds.
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The movie, shot within a shoestring budget of Rs 1 crore in a span of seven days, has been released with only 75 prints through PVR. “We didn’t set out to make it a feature film. It was meant for television,” says Gorky. The film’s lead actors — TV stars Gaurav Chopra, Rajesh Kumar and Rohit Khurana, and Gladrags Mega Model Zeenal Kamdar — are appearing on big screen for the first time.
The question is: how much impact will a movie built around a brand have on the brand’s popularity? For one, the film has received far from flattering reviews and the theatres where it is being screened aren’t exactly packed. Besides, brands have routinely found a place in films: James Bond in an Aston Martin, Tom Cruise wearing his aviators, Shah Rukh Khan driving a Santro, Hrithik Roshan swearing by Bournvita in Krrish. “And the more ridiculous ones like Vidya Balan offering Saridon to Saif
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Ali Khan in Parineeta,” says Anand Halve, co-founder of brand and communications consultancy Chlorophyll. “In a film, where the canvas is so large, the brand is bound to shrink,” he adds. Wouldn’t Men Will Be Men end up being an extended advertisement?
Its makers don’t think so. “This goes ahead of product placement and brand promos. The storyline is such that the brand essence comes across,” says Samar Khan, head of Red Chillies Idiot Box, the TV arm of Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment, which produced the film. Advertising of liquor and cigarette brands is banned in India since 1995. To skirt the ban, liquor companies often resort to surrogate advertisement where they promote a different product — usually soda — under the same brand name. Khan says, “A film like Men Will Be Men is a great new avenue for such brands to reach to the consumers through subtle communication.”
Khan and Gorky say that because the film was about the image they wanted to project, senior officials of Pernod Ricard were involved from the word “go”. “They left the creative side to us,” says Khan, “but for everything else, they were around. For example, they wanted alcohol consumption to be shown as a fun, but responsible, activity between friends.” So there are no scenes where people are shown drinking on the streets or drinking and driving. Lewd remarks and show of flesh were frowned upon. “The company stepped in every time it felt there was something that could hurt its image,” says Khan.
“The brand is targeted at the young male between 25 and 30 years,” says Basu. “It is positioned as confident, ambitious, youthful and fun-loving and revolves around the common traits which define ‘men’,” he says adding that Imperial Blue is the second biggest brand in terms of volume in the Pernod Ricard portfolio and among the top three brands in its segment.
While the India-specific brand, which was launched in 1998, is also advertised through TV and radio, the company feels the film would have a greater impact than what the same money could’ve had on television.
