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Everybody knows one has to be on digital media now to promote a new product. Even movie makers, who advertise their forthcoming release across Facebook and YouTube. Now, a team from IIM Bangalore has gone about with serious intent to establish the connect between box office collections and promotions on social media. And, what’s more, the case study by Prof U. Dinesh Kumar, Suhruta Kulkarni and Karthika A. S., on the horror movie 1920: Evil Returns has been published by Harvard Business Publishing and is being used by students in the US, Canada, Norway and Slovenia, says a media release from the top B-school.
Social media marketing is taught as part of the Analytics course at IIM-B, and there are electives that talk about social media marketing that target potential digital marketing practitioners. “As an academic study, the IIM-B team focused on movie marketing on social media. The case study assessed the impact of social media marketing and the relationship between box office collections and social media buzz,” said Kumar, Professor, Quantitative Methods & Information Systems, IIM-B. The movie, 1920: Evil Returns , the second installation of a horror franchise, was released in 2012. The movie cost Rs 9 crore to make and garnered a little over Rs 20 crore at the box office. The third in the series, 1920: London , is slated for release later this year.
Evil Returns , points out Ami Shah of IntelliAssist, the company that carried out the social media marketing for the film, was a low-budget movie. The objective was to target those who like the horror movie genre. Three key aspects were reviewed – social media content management, online engagement and word of mouth and online advertising. “IIM-B did an independent sentiment analysis and also derived a correlation between the region-wise box office collection and Facebook likes,” says Shah.
Dinesh Kumar said that the B-school’s analysis established the effectiveness of social media marketing in promoting the movie by using mathematical regression models between box office collections in different regions and ‘likes’ on Facebook and YouTube. They also did a ‘sentiment analysis’ on the response to the movie’s promos.
According to Kumar, “Understanding social media tools is important for a social media marketer but more important is understanding consumers and their behaviour. Platforms change but principles of marketing don’t! Keeping pace with consumer trends is as important as keeping pace with technology.”
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