/ Star Branding

by Anokhi Admin

Star Branding

Oct 07, 2014

Koral Dasgupta’s new book teaches academics and film fans alike how to market themselves like Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan.

Growing up, Koral Dasgupta never imagined that her fascination with Bollywood’s favourite movie star would one day make her an author. She was just a really big admirer of Shah Rukh Khan.

A business school instructor, Dasgupta used knowledge she had acquired keenly observing the star all those years to explain marketing management theories to her students. “I dealt with grown-up learners who wanted new applications for old theories,” Dasgupta says. To pique their interest, she dug up stories of Bollywood personalities for examples of good branding. “Teaching them, I realized that exemplifying living brands is definitely better than speaking the language of Nestlé or Cadbury,” she says.

Somewhere along the way during her years as a professor, Dasgupta fell in love with the idea of writing a book with semiacademic content for management undergraduates. In early 2012, the Mumbai-based author did just that, setting out to document Shah Rukh Khan’s marketing genius. In Power of a Common Man: Connecting with Consumers the SRK Way, 34-year-old Dasgupta delves into SRK’s career, right from the time he made his first appearance in the TV series Fauji in 1988. The 16-chapter book discusses every aspect of the actor’s life that helped him build SRK the brand. Among the many works written on Bollywood actors, it’s the first to focus on self-branding skills.

“The idea behind the book was to give students something that they would find exciting to read, discuss, know and, most importantly, debate,” she says.

It was an easy choice for Dasgupta. “People around the globe can connect with Indian films and SRK has a global reach. And though Bollywood has several successful actors, there’s no one who sells like SRK,” she says.

Her aim was to create a balance between education and entertainment. “I first wrote a serious management referral but discarded it right away on account of its academic textbook format,” she explains. While the book was meant to be a guide for enjoyable and effectual learning for students, she also wanted to keep SRK fans interested. “I could in no way have detached SRK fans from the book. They were the ones who would have cheered on and enjoyed reading it the most,” she says. So, out went the grids and statistics and in came more interesting, accessible info on her subject’s life. “I want every layperson who picks up the book to benefit from it. With handy inputs from SRK’s life, anyone can build their personal brand,” she says.

Dasgupta feels that her book can be a hit among SRK’s international fans, who are always eager to know more about the megastar. “Not only will it give them details about things they didn’t know about SRK, but [it will] also make them think about him in a grossly different context,” she says.

Dasgupta, however, hasn’t involved SRK directly in the book so far. There are no interviews with the actor and she did not request his participation in launching the book. “SRK is extremely busy and I respect that. My book is a gift to the actor, I’m not here to take anything from him,” she says. True to her word, Dasgupta has addressed him in her prologue telling him how inspirational he has been for her. “I’ve mailed the first copy of my book to SRK and am hopeful that he will share his review some day,” she says.

BY PRITI SALIAN

_{PHOTOS COURTESY OF KORAL DASGUPTA

PUBLISHED IN THE FASHION & STYLE ISSUE, 2014}