When Ambi Parameswaran launched his book, at Crossword, Kemps Corner, Mumbai, he had a panel full of mixologists tell the audience about their favourite drinks to make, keys in balancing flavours, the basis on which they suggest drinks to customers, and secret ingredients in cocktails. “What has this to do with marketing?” one might ask. 

Well, in this brilliantly executed idea by the former FCB Ulka CEO, he figured that for all the marketing-centric information and jargon, one could read the book. But the launch was going to be fun, and full of analogies—only if you listened closely, of course. 

Over his career, Parameswaran has found that marketing, advertising and communications (both at the agency-to-brand and brand-to-customer stage) have been taught in silos. As he moved across agencies and departments, over his 50+ years in the industry, he picked up valuable trade secrets from niches and applied them to the bigger picture.  Much of that wisdom is documented in his new book, ‘Marketing Mixology’. 

A voracious writer, this is Parameswaran’s twelfth book, following the success of his titles ‘Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles’, 'Spring - Bouncing Back from Rejection’, and ‘All The World's A Stage’. 

With ‘Marketing Mixology’, he wanted to make readers the perfect little concoction of four fundamental themes: consumer insight, brand building, negotiation and effective communication. 

And now, excerpts from an interview with him… 

My learnings have been largely working with clients and working on brands. Every time it was a new challenge—a new product category and a new set of consumers. So every time you work on a new assignment, you learn a new marketing problem.

This is where my book ‘Marketing Mixology’ comes in. I've talked about four themes—understanding where the consumer is coming from, the role the product has to play in the consumer's life and how you can communicate this to the consumer in a way they will accept it and enjoy using the product. The more you spend time understanding consumers, the more successful your marketing job will be.

So yes, Henry Ford has been quoted saying, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Steve Jobs also said that often the consumers don't know what they want. But it doesn't mean that Henry Ford or Steve Jobs did not understand the customer. 

Now our job is to understand the consumers; and you may find that you have a product which will satisfy a consumer need but the consumer doesn't know that product exists. So your job, then, is to go and communicate it.  

So it's in fact wrong to say that trying to understand consumers is a waste of time. 

The job of marketing has now become very oriented towards what is called performance marketing—focussing on the number of clicks or sales. This obsession with performance marketing is a problem because beyond a certain point, if you only focus on performance, your return on investment will drop. Therefore, brands need to balance performance marketing with, what I call, brand market.

This is my 12th book and it was born in a different form. It was supposed to be two short Kindle books—one on branding and the other on negotiation. Later, my publisher and literary agent asked me to write two more and I wrote on understanding consumers and on communication. 

Then, I had to go back and rewrite what I had written on negotiation and branding, and that became this new book—‘Marketing Mixology’. The reason I call it mixology is simply because no marketing book will cover negotiation, one-on-one communication and one-to-many communication, the way I have. This is not typical marketing and it's been fun putting it together. 

I think if you're trying to get into the world of marketing and marketing communication, my book ‘Marketing Mixology’ is a good start. Books by Rama Bijapurkar and Harish Bhatt are also excellent for you to read. We should read Indian books because they bring Indian perspectives, which international books may not bring.