New Delhi, September 22: Brief Case: How Brands Create Desire, Trust and Culture, by advertising veteran Dr Sanjay Arora, reached No.1 on Amazon India’s bestseller list in the categories of Management, Marketing and Sales & within hours of the author announcing pre-orders this morning,
The book also holds the No.1 position in Amazon India’s Hot New Releases across Marketing, Management and Sales.
The climb was unusually steep. At the start of the day the title was ranked #137,261 among all books on Amazon India. By late afternoon it had reached the top of its categories, placing it ahead of established titles including Philip Kotler’s Marketing Management and Simon Sinek’s Start With Why.
Demand ran ahead of stock. For a period during the day the title showed as temporarily unavailable to buyers in several cities, including Bengaluru and Delhi, as orders outpaced the quantity allocated to the platform.
The book publishes on 21 September through Penguin Business, an imprint of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher.
Penguin Business commissioned Dr Arora to write the book after his marketing stories had become immensely popular online, both in India and internationally, garnering over 25 million views a month.
The book examines forty brands across six sections, among them Colgate, Maggi, Parle-G, Bisleri, Blinkit, Nespresso, Red Bull, Dyson, Patagonia, Toyota, Tropicana, De Beers, LEGO, Spotify and Walmart. Each chapter closes with three plainly stated marketing lessons.
“There are many, many books on marketing theory and frameworks which are good only for academicians and hard-core practitioners, not accessible or interesting to the normal man. I decided to change that and have written them as engaging short stories, each rich with verified data and facts, each doubling up as a mini case study, hence the name Brief Case. This makes them highly engaging, and as an icing on the cake, each of the 40 stories ends with three marketing lessons which can be put to immediate use,” says the author.
The book is a result of deep research, and a substantial part of it is devoted to correcting widely repeated industry accounts that do not survive checking. Among them is the identity of the child on the Parle-G wrapper, a mystery that has generated decades of speculation and at least three names printed in the press. The figure is an illustration, developed by the Everest Advertising creative team in the 1960s, a fact Parle Products has itself confirmed. Dr Arora later worked at Everest, in the mid-1980s.
“The stories our industry tells about itself get repeated until they harden into fact,” said Dr Arora. “A great many of them do not hold up. Forty years in, I wanted to write down what actually happened in those rooms, and what a marketer can take from it on a Monday morning.”
