.
On the other hand, there is another Indian movie called "Three Idiots" by Rajkumar Hirani. The story itself is hilarious and brilliant, but because of the scanty marketing input, it didn't receive a very impressive opening gross, which is barely over 2 million dollars in North America (Box Office, IMDb). Several reasons contributed to this dissatisfied performance. First of all, the name is ambiguous, and somehow stupid. In China, the name is translated as "Three Idiots Play and Fight in the Bollywood", which is too foolish to attract audience. Second, the trailer is being so crude and obscure. There are too many scenes made of vulgar, Photoshop-produced, illusionary images, certainly reducing audiences' desire to watch the movie. Last but not the least, "3 Idiots" doesn't have such an obvious target audience segment, or we can say its potential audience is too broad. "The wider the potential audience, the more difficult it is to find the comfort zone for how we're going to market it." (Michael Burns, Inside a movie marketer's playbook, Tad Friend) For fitting for all segments people, marketers have to consider comprehensively. For example, they need to avoid the sex and bloody scenes considering for young and old audience and to refrain from emphasizing too much on romantic plots in order not to bore the men audience. As a result, the marketing campaigning became indistinctive and insufficient. .
In the marketing campaigning, the most common segments are the Four Quadrants: men under 25; older men; women under 25; and older women (Inside a movie marketer's playbook, Tad Friend). It's a classic demographics segment. Audiences are divided by their age, gender, education, etc. And then marketers adopt pertinent approaches toward different segments. In addition to the Four Quadrants approach, there are plenty of other segmenting methods. For example, as a broadly accepted film, the marketers could use geodemographic segmentation.
