Marketing

Philip Kotler defines marketing as a:

human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes. (Kotler, 1980, p. 13)

This basically means the selling of products and services. Marketing consists of four variables, called the marketing mix, and these are often characterised as the 'Four Ps':

1. price (of little relevance in film)
2. place
3. product
4. promotion.

For our purposes we are interested in 'place', the distribution of East is East; the product (see package) and the promotion.

Films are marketed like any other product or service. However, because they are all unique, each film must have its own campaign. A brand of beans, for example, only needs one campaign, in a given period, for every tin. This is obviously expensive, the average cost of marketing ('p + a' - prints and advertising) a Hollywood film, produced by a major studio, is about $25million (approximately half the cost of the film). One way Hollywood tries to make its films easier to market is through the High Concept (see Lacey and Stafford, 2000).

The British film industry, primarily due to its relatively small domestic market, does not spend anywhere near Hollywood's amount of money. East is East cost £2.4 million to make and a relatively large £1 million was spent on marketing it.