A look on ‘Brand Bollywood’

Bollywood, considered as the Indian counterpart to Hollywood, is the largest producer or films in the world. From being one of the many film industries in India, Bollywood has grown into something else altogether- a brand. The transition of Hindi movies or Bollywood can be primarily associated to the growing Indian Diaspora. It is due to their existence that Indian locales were replaced by plush foreign locales in Indian cinema. Another reason of the creation of ‘Brand Bollywood’ is the opening up of the Indian economy to the world.

Am I being too serious here?  Well, let us bring it down a bit. Every aspect of making a movie in this industry contributes to the making of Brand Bollywood. Bollywood music, dance, actors, technicians, their life, lifestyle, almost everything is marketed. Money plays everywhere. The annual turnover of Hindi movies world-wide is close to one hundred thousand million Indian rupees. One can see that this figure is small as Bollywood gives job to around 6 million people.

The brand image of Bollywood is mostly spread through the world by its actors, or a better term, stars. Personalities like Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai or Hrithik Roshan creates waves in most of the countries in the world. It is widely known that Shah Rukh Khan has a huge fan following in Germany.

Another face of Brand Bollywood is in its stars endorsing various business brands. There are many people in India who go by the products endorsed by their favorite actors. Business companies know this fact and act accordingly. They pay the stars huge amounts of money and bring them in as brand ambassadors. The bad side of this is that some of the actors think, the more they get paid by a company the more popular they are. There is competition between actors in this matter which drains out money from business houses unnecessarily.