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Selling the Taj Mahal to America
By Vivek Wadhwa   |   Wednesday,August 12,2009   |    1 Comments
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For a Bollywood film, deeper market research meant seeing mainstream U.S. audiences' potential to embrace an enduring Indian love story.

No matter what your business, success lies in understanding your market and correctly positioning your product. You can have the right message for the wrong market and be moderately successful. Or you can create a potential blockbuster by carefully analyzing your market opportunity and effectively selling into this.

A chance meeting with one of India's film moguls led me to realize how well these marketing principles apply even to an industry like Bollywood. And I was thrilled to have the opportunity to play a tiny role in bringing the Taj Mahal to America.

HARNESSING "DIVINE ENERGY." In previous columns, I've written about how a tech executive like me got involved in the film industry (see BW Online, 1/24/04, "Bollywood, Here I Come"). The Taj Mahal journey started with a dinner at the residence of legendary Bollywood actor and producer Feroz Khan . On my second trip to Mumbai, instead of introducing me to Miss India at dinner as before, Feroz presented to me to his brother, Akbar, and his lovely wife, Mariam. In Bollywood, the Khans have a celebrity status equal to the British royals, so I felt pretty honored.

Akbar had devoted nine years to a single obsession -- documenting the story of the Taj Mahal and sharing it with future generations. He said, during a visit to the Taj, he felt captivated by the "divine energy" within the magnificent mausoleum, "where every slab of engraved marble seems to speak of the eternal love the emperor Shah Jahan felt for his wife, Mumtaz."

This inspiration led him to produce one of the most magnificent films ever shot in India. With a budget estimated at $15 million, Taj Mahal -- An Eternal Love Story also ranked as one of the most expensive. To complete this epic, he rented a historic fort from the Indian government for three years, built a dozen sets as marvelous as the royal palaces of the Mughals, and hired top actors and many thousands of extras.

And now it was time for him to face the biggest challenge that any entrepreneur faces: Selling his product and recovering his investment.

UNSPECTACULAR GROSSES. Akbar understood the Indian and Middle Eastern markets and believed that he had the makings of a blockbuster on his hands. He knew every Indian child studied the history of the
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Reader's comments(1)
1: Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story was released on 18th November 2005 in the US.
Posted by:MATHEW MATHEW - 29th Sep 2009
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