This book is a second book in the several of case study books Draftfcb Ulka, one of India’s top five marketing communication groups will be supporting, as a part of its endeavour to share learning with the young professionals in the industry and students of marketing and advertising.

All the cases featured in this book are based on real life brands handled by the various teams at Draftfcb Ulka Advertising. These cases have been used extensively in internal training programmes and some have also been ‘tested’ in brand management courses taught by the authors at various business schools.

To set the tone of the book the first chapter gives a snapshot of the advertising process.

Draftfcb Ulka was one of the first marketing communication groups in the country to set up a dedicated brand consulting division Cogito Consulting. In addition to handling client assignments, the division also conducts projects to understand the changing dynamics of the Indian consumer. These studies are published in Cogito Journal, a controlled circulation publication. Some of these articles are timeless and we have included three on the articles that deal with interesting topics such as, ‘How Advertising Works’, ‘Celebrity Endorsements’ and ‘Promotions in Car Marketing’!

The book features 12 cases broadly classified into three groups: consumer products, consumer durables and services. It should be noted that the fundamentals of brand building adverting are common across all types of products, but the nuances change with product class (high involvement-low involvement), competitive scenario etc.

To set the template for each group we have provided a chapter highlighting some of the key issues involved with the creation of brand building consumer product advertising, consumer durable advertising and services advertising.

The book also provides a glossary of common advertising terms.

It should be noted that all the cases featured in the book are drawn from the archives of the agency, dating back five years to a full decade. Many of the brands featured here have grown dramatically over the last 10 years and the case is not a reflection of the current reality of these brands. But the basic fundamentals of creating brand building advertising shown in these cases are as applicable today as they were four or ten years ago.

Another key feature of the book is that almost all the cases featured here are for brand campaigns that have won accolades in various industry forums, especially the Advertising Effectiveness Awards.

The book has been written in a very readable form with a lot of visual material and can be read by a management student as well as by a working non-MBA executive.

When the first book, FCB-Ulka Brand Building Advertising – Concepts and Cases was published in 2001, only one other book was available that had been written by a practicing Indian executive featuring real  life marketing cases (S. Sengupta – Brand Positioning). We are happy to report in the last 10 years we have seen numerous marketing/ branding books by Indian executives that have hit the book shelves. We have drawn inspiration from all of them, and in no particular order, Rama Bijapurkar, Ram Sehgal, Santosh Desai, Ivan Arthur, \Kurien Mathew, Jayanta Sengupta, A.G. Krishnamurthy, R, Sridhar, Anand Halve, Sanjay Tiwari, Ramesh Narayan Arpita Menon....all deserve our thanks.

We do hope the next decade will see a lot more material on Indian brands and Indian markets made available to students and young executives.