Marketing Tools for Promoting Domestically-produced Movies in Russian Cinemas

Marketing plays a particularly important role in the film industry because it is used by film marketers to draw people's attention to their products and attract them to cinemas. The use of these tools makes it possible to build different promotional strategies, as well as to find an individual approach to each project, successfully implementing its cultural and economic component. In Russia, relatively few scholarly works have been published that analyse the relationship between the failure or success of films in distribution and the use of marketing tools. In general, many film companies, distributors, and cinemas lack a systematic approach to using marketing tools in the promotion of films. In the context of the pandemic, this problem has become even more acute. Moreover, no research has been conducted into the role of the pandemic in potentially changing these tools and demonstrating the impact of Covid-19 on the domestic film market. Representatives of the film market resort to various measures, without always fully understanding what should be done and how, especially in times of restrictions. As the subject of film marketing does not occupy a prominent place in the Russian academic environment, this paper aims to partially fill this gap and develop practical recommendations for key figures in the film industry. This paper uses an online survey to assess the influence of marketing tools for film promotion on the audience's perception of a film. Also, thanks to expert interviews, the market situation before and after Covid-19 has been described. Thus, the study analyses the effectiveness of the use of various marketing promotion tools in relation to Russian cinema. The work provides a better understanding of the components on which market representatives rely when promoting a film. Taken together, these results may have important implications for the Russian film market.