How SS Rajamouli marketed RRR in the northern states: ‘Do they know Ram Charan or Jr NTR?’

Before releasing RRR in the northern states, SS Rajamouli asked a team of people to visit the Tier-2 cities to understand how popular he and his two lead heroes, Jr NTR and Ram Charan, are in the belt.

By: Entertainment Desk

New Delhi | December 31, 2022 12:01 PM IST

3 min read

RRR has been directed by SS Rajamouli.

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The name SS Rajamouli became a huge brand across the world after his magnum-opus RRR became a humongous hit. The film, originally made in Telugu, became a rage not just in the South, but also in the northern cities of the country. For making his film work in the North, the filmmaker had a smart marketing strategy in hand. He asked a team of people to visit the Tier-2 cities to understand how popular he and his two lead heroes, Jr NTR and Ram Charan, were in the belt.

Movie marketing expert Varun Gupta recently revealed that Rajamouli had asked his team to understand the audience’s behaviour in the northern market. He told Pinkvilla, “SS Rajamouli asked me and my team to go for a one-week survey to Tier 2 north Indian towns and ask, ‘do they know Ram Charan or Jr NTR’ and if they do, ask for which film. Do they know Rajamouli or Baahubali? If you see the RRR campaign, the hoardings in the North very clearly say ‘from the director of Baahubali’ because people knew Baahubali, they didn’t know Rajamouli.”

Also read | How SS Rajamouli’s RRR swept box-offices this year and bewitched audiences across the globe

The survey was conducted in cities like Nagpur, Indore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and many Hindi-speaking cities, and across different age groups.

Watch the trailer of SS Rajamouli’s RRR here:

Gupta shared that Rajamouli didn’t want to “cheat the audience” and just put the faces of Ajay Devgn and Alia Bhatt on the posters. He wanted to know “what aspect of my actors and me are the audience aware of? Do they know Makkhi or Baahubali? In the South, the stamp of Rajamouli is enough. Before RRR, people knew Baahubali as a bigger brand than Rajamouli. So we used that brand seven years later in RRR.”

Also read | Lagaan to RRR: Rajamouli’s Raj-era spectacle doesn’t need cricket — it relies on a shrunken, majoritarian nationalism

In the Hindi-speaking states, RRR earned Rs 274.31 crore. The film recently bagged five 2023 Critics Choice Awards nominations. It has been nominated in the following categories – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Visual Effects, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Song (Naatu Naatu). It also secured a spot in the Best Non-English Language Film and Best Original Song at the 2023 Golden Globe nominations list.

It is yet to be seen if the film can score any nominations at the Academy Awards.

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