Why Raees May Be SRK’s Biggest Flop

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan's upcoming film Raees is likely to come a cropper at the box office. Probably, the blunt prediction will hurt the sentiments of SRK fans. However, the forecast is based on the concepts of ‘invisible selling’ - the science of selling to the unconscious brain.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the human brain has very limited capacity to think and memorise. In psychology, abundance theory suggests about trusting that you'll find what you need, because there's plenty of everything available. On the contrary, there is no abundance in our brains. We use our brains like misers.

The moot question is: Is there a limit to the human mind's capacity?

Our conscious brains can only handle something like 40 bits of information a second, while our unconscious minds can handle 11 million bits of information per second.

Let us thoroughly examine the fate of SRK's Raees in relation to the concept of the limited brain power.

There is no denying the fact that SRK is associated with one thing. You can test it out for yourself with a few mental questions. Let us carry out this exercise with a few simple questions. As soon as the question ends, shut your eyes for five seconds and speak out your answer.

First question is what do you think of when you hear the name Shah Rukh Khan? The chances are very high that an image of a “romantic hero“or a “lover boy“ instantly comes to your mind. The Bollywood Badshah is associated with a romantic hero image at the back of our mind as Nike is with athletic stuff , Rolex is with highend luxury watches and Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan is with angry young man image and so on.

People “slot“ SRK as a romantic hero as they have limited brain power. Other Bollywood stars have their own specific 'slots'. For instance, Akshay Kumar for action, Sanjay Dutt for gangster, Govinda for madcap comedy & so on. In the past, therefore, if SRK played any other role, he had failed miserably as there is a mismatch in people’s brains. For example Badshah - comedy, Paheli- parallel cinema, Swades - scientist or Ra one - action hero.

In Rahul Dhalokia’s Raees, SRK plays a character of an alleged gangster who ran the illicit liquor business in Gujarat during the peak of Prohibition in the 1990s. It is going to be a fiasco even if the Bollywood superstar gave his best performance till date as people do not want to see him in that role because of their limited brain power.

In a nutshell, one must be very clear and careful about his “positioning". There are certain immutable laws of marketing (The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing - Al Ries & Jack Trout) that just cannot be broken even if you are SRK, Barack Obama or Bill Gates.