I continue to be impressed by the word of mouth marketing surrounding Mani Ratnam movies. Unlike your staple Kollywood or Bollywood fare there is no grand press release or announcement surrounding his projects. The first time you hear about them is through totally insipid news bites. It is almost as if the journalist is weaving a bigger inconsequential story around a flimsy piece of information. Consider the news item from Indiaglitz:
Rumors are on that Prithviraj has been approached to do a villain in a Manirathinam flick that stars Vikram and Aishwarya Rai in lead roles. Abhisek Bachchan plays the hero in the Hindi version and Vikram replaces Prithviraj as villain.
The rest of the article seems to be built around this miniscule information. There are other news articles which have both Prithiviraj and Vikram sharing screen space with Abhishek Bachchan. Another article questions Prithiviraj's decision to essay a negative character.
Today, Rediff claims a second Mani Ratnam movie titled Ravan with the customary question mark at the end of the news header.
The article speculates on a movie starring Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai while passing in mention the untitled bilingual movie of which no one has any real information about.
If this is word of mouth marketing, then it is functioning at the highest level. Stealth mode marketing - buzz surrounding a product that no one knows anything about. Just enough to stir curiosity without really giving anything away. How does he manage this?
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He is like Steve Jobs of Tamil cinema. He can create buzz with 0 publicity unlike others. Shankar comes close.
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