Generational Segmentation, Gen Z & the Next Great Marketing Challenge

As India’s Gen Z cohort approaches full voting age, political strategists are increasingly confronting a challenge long familiar to marketers: how to understand and engage a vast but highly heterogeneous audience. This article traces the evolution of generational segmentation from its origins in marketing theory to its growing relevance in political communication. It argues that the future belongs not to broad-brush appeals aimed at “the youth,” but to sophisticated micro-segmentation that recognises the diverse aspirations, identities and realities within India’s 400 million-strong Gen Z population.

Advertising; The Gift that Keeps Giving?

This week I’m travelling abroad on business and am therefore time-challenged. My editor suggested that, instead of my usual article, … More

Marketing in 2026: An Age of Shared Agency

As years go, 2025 will probably be remembered in the short term as an “annus horribulus” given its geopolitics and the overall state of the world. However, over the longer arc of history, it will probably be remembered as part of the beginning of the age of AI. In my MxMIndia column this fortnight, I look forward to 2026 in the light of the longer frame.

From Recall to Rasa: Toward a New Theory of Advertising

Over my four decades in advertising, the last decades have seen the most change. The mean constraints of performance marketing, the obscurities of Big Data and soon the uncharted territory of AI. To regain its mojo, advertising needs to be more creative — not less —more in touch with the human side of the consumer, and move towards realising its potential as an art form. This fortnight, my MxMIndia column cloaks this thought in the form of a new theory of advertising. Sort of.

The Three Immutable Laws of Brand-Building

Much has changed over the four decades in my career as a brand and communication strategist. From the certainties of mass-media to the flux of the digital world. From the world of product UPSs to psychographic segmentation. However I find that the fundamentals of brand-building remain much the same. This post outlines three.

From CMO to CAO: How Marketing Can Get Its Mojo Back

With a new generation of consumers classical marketing is set to make a comeback even while marketing and advertising technology conquer new frontiers. Today’s post on my marketing blog outlines the path.

How Marketing Can Be the Hero and not the Handmaiden to The Anti-Heroes Of The Digital Age

Once in a while comes along a book or a body of thought that impacts one highly because it is both revolutionary in its newness while at the same time being resonant with one’s deepest notions of self and society. This post is the result of one such book that has crystalized in me a marketing project of global scope and deep societal impact that I hope to evangelize over the coming years. Write to me if you want to join in this nascent effort

The Four Sort Of Fundamentals of Maybe Going Viral

Making a video or post go viral is the holy grail in digital marketing.
Today’s post on my blog lists some pointers emerging from a recent exhaustive study in the US market and leads from there to a couple of larger questions regarding the science and art of advertising.

Decoding Creative Advertising – Addressing The Highest Common Denominator (HCD)

Here is the second of the series “Decoding Creative Advertising” where I reference Apple’s advertising over the decades to discern a greatness-making creative strategy driving some of their campaigns. The first of this series was published on my blog on June 3 where I examined the creative strategy driving the Volkswagen Beetle campaign of the 50s.

Decoding Creative Advertising – Mining The Gestalt

Today’s post is the first in a new series titled “Decoding Creative Advertising” In my experience the sobriquet “creative” applies to a very small number of advertising campaigns. Campaigns that are created by people who break the rules of advertising not because they can but because their mastery of them allows them to transcend them. I undertake the decoding of some such campaigns as an exercise in refreshing the sense of possibilities inherent in the art of advertising.