Once upon a time nothing succeeded like success. These days nothing succeeds like marketing. Not Kolaveri Di. Not The Dirty Picture. No success story is complete unless we are able to draw a marketing moral. The pinnacle of success is when your story becomes part of a B-school curriculum. Remember when everyone wanted to be a doctor or an engineer, or at least their parents wanted them to be one? Now everyone, even doctors and engineers, wants to get an MBA.

Thus it only makes sense that a completely nonsensical song like Kolaveri Di is now part of the course at one of our premier business schools — IIM Ahmedabad. A case study named Project Kolaveri has already been done by one Sajal Kumar, a post grad student at IIM Kozhikode who also designed an online survey to analyse its marketing success. This site itself has eight helpful lessons marketing professionals can learn from Kolaveri.

The free market was supposed to have allowed the soul of our nation, long suppressed, to find utterance. Who knew it would start speaking in tongues, in the gobbeldy gook of marketing jargon? Dhanush might swear up and down that the Kolaveri crew had no grand viral marketing plan, that they merely uploaded that video and Kolaveri Di’s success just happened. But we won’t rest until we find the long tail in every cow-u cow-u, holy cow-u.

Of course, we don’t need an MBA to understand that talent isn’t always enough. We have to be smart about marketing it. But we seem have reached the tipping point where the marketing is starting to trump the content that is being marketed. Dhanush sings Kolaveri Di. Screengrab from YouTube.

That is bad news for content. Vidya Balan might pour her heart into a role the likes of which has rarely been seen in our commercial filmdom – a woman, unabashed and unapologetic about her sexuality, a vamp who revels in her vampdom instead of saddling it with the woe-is-me baggage of childhood abuse and marital rape. Here is a film that’s selling on the star power of its heroine, unheard of since the Rekha days. But the only lesson we look for is the marketing mantra so that you can replicate The Dirty Picture over and over again. In other words, how do you reduce Vidya Balan and her tummy rolls and thunder thighs to a Powerpoint slide?

So the landmark film, The Dirty Picture, becomes a marketing fable. We learn that Vidya Balan went on the cover of the Hindi magazine Manohar Kahaniya because it will sell the film better in B and C-tier towns in heartland India where the spending power is rising. Tanuj Garg, the CEO of Balaji Motion Pictures which produced The Dirty Picture summed it up thus: “The financial success of The Dirty Picture is reflective not only of our orientation towards high quality content but of our unparalleled marketing strength.”

Note the content is “high quality.” But the marketing is “unparalleled.” Milton Hershey, the founder of Hershey’s chocolates once said “ Give them quality. That’s the best kind of advertising.” We have turned his advice on its head. Now we are convinced as soon as something is successful that it must be a success story of marketing. The quality is no longer in the content, it’s in the marketing.

And for critics it just becomes an easy way to dismiss it because the moment it’s commercially successful, it’s artistic value is automatically suspect. So Poorva Rajaram in Tehelka complains that The Dirty Picture is just another shiny finished product of “corporate cocksureness” – a film “without full-fledged mainstream appeal borne out of a studious approach to packaging, feigned sensationalism, audience receptivity and sales.” She wonders what would have happened if Mughal-e-Azam was sold as a “marketing oddity” – “Look a badass woman! And she was real too!” If Mughal-e-Azam was released today it will indeed be  sold that way.  And we would have a Mughal-e-Azam in that Business Perspective in Contemporary Film Industry course at IIM.

Now that the Nampally criminal court has decided to book a case against Vidya Balan under the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986, The Dirty Picture will no doubt do even better at the box office. And that will become yet another marketing tip for those trying to de-construct the film’s success and re-construct another Dirty Picture. Marketing rule number one: Get sued.

But let’s look across the border for another definition of success. The  cheeky Aloo Anday song by the Beygairat Brigade has been touted as Pakistan’s Kolaveri Di, just less slick, less hummable, and less successful, at least in the myopic way we have come to define success as pure profit. But Aloo Anday takes the mickey out of Pakistani society and politics. You have to have a glossary of Pakistani politics handy to decode everything it’s knocking down. And it’s not an aberration. Pakistan, as a story in Outlook points out has a long history of social satire and lampooning, an old music culture based on irreverence. Now technology has allowed that culture to reach a global audience says film director Shoaib Mansoor.

But what is most noteworthy is that nowhere in this history of irreverence is there any discussion about whether Aloo Andey has made money or not, whether it’s got its Beygirat Brigade record deals or landed them on the cover of Rolling Stone. Its success is its cheekiness, its boldness, the place it occupies against a larger culture of dissent. Its success, in short, is about its content.

We have lost that definition of success on our way to the bank. And that is a cultural loss we tend to blind ourselves to. As Siddharth Bhatia wonders in The Asian Age “The successful and saleable painters from India who have made a splash abroad have stayed in the comfort zone of tackling ‘safe’ issues such as globalisation; how many have taken on the Indian establishment?”

It’s not really worth taking on the Indian establishment because that would make no  marketing sense. We have little incentive to rock the boat, because the rising tide of the GDP is supposedly lifting all our boats. “This is a country that is largely pleased with itself to the point of being smug,” writes Bhatia. “That mood is not conducive to producing radical art.” Or selling it. Napoleon supposedly disparaged England as a nation of  shopkeepers although it was Adam Smith who first made that remark. But we are fast turning into something much worse and far more empty a nation of petty marketers.