Saturday, May 17, 2008

SRK: The Latest Marketing Mantra For Celebrity Blogs


Former Miss. India and Bollywood actor Neha Dhupia once quipped famously, “In India only Sex and SRK sell!” Time and again, these words have been proven true. The latest celebrity “blogging” revolution has once again done that.

Forget what they taught you in B-School! Bury away the theories of Kotler! Because our Bollywood celebs have come up with the most bankable marketing mantra of their own. If you wanna sell something, get SRK to do it for you. And hey, we are not talking of advertisements here. Naah! No need to even pay Mr. Khan for selling your stuff. Just quote him or talk about him.

This is what a few of our celebs have been doing in the recent past to get more visitors to their blogs. Mr. Amitabh Bachchan had to stoop so low as to put up some graphics and statistics on his blog, comparing the performance of shows hosted by SRK and himself. And the other Mr. Khan - Aamir probably did not get enough media attention by proclaiming himself to be the No. 1 in the industry. So he decided to write some mumbo jumbo in his blog about “Shahrukh, his dog”!

Both these blogs have received a lot of traffic after the media reported the use of SRK’s name in these blogs. An interviewer recently asked Mr. Shahrukh Khan if he had any intentions to blog. His candid reply was :“No, for three reasons. One, when I type, I do so in caps and on the net, that’s like screaming. Two, because when I write, I write very long copy. And three, I am a very busy man, I don’t have time to write long blogs… also, my colleagues say that they blog because the media writes a lot of things and they want to put their version out there.

So, in short, you end up doing the journalist’s job. In my mind, it’s very clear I am an actor and not a reporter, so I will do my job, and I will let them do theirs. If they write something that’s wrong, I’ll abuse that person and say they got their facts wrong. If they get it right, then I’ll say ‘great, they represented the facts well’."

There you go Mr. Amitabh Bachchan and Mr. Aamir Khan. Quite apparently, you have too much free time on your hands and nothing better to do! While we are fans of your work onscreen, this doesn’t go down too well with us.

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