Brand management in ‘comical’ avatar

It was a long, long process. Neil George would sit at his place and write the script, send it over to the artist in Moldova he had found on the internet. The artist would send back the pencil sketch first, get it approved, ink it, colour it and layer it with conversations. Each page took a month, because the artist was working only part-time on the project. Neil, a busy man himself, with a corporate job, didn’t mind the wait. But then one day, the artist just disappeared, leaving poor Neil with eight chapters and 80 pages of a comic book he had chosen to do after a lot of thinking.    

This was in 2013, three years after he had begun working on that novel concept — of creating a comic book on brand management, for he realised there hasn’t been one made on the subject so far. Neil did not give up. He found two other artists — twins, Xong Bros, based in Kolkata, who started the work from scratch. Today, Building the Beast — What Really Happens in Brand Management is out, and after it got picked up by online bookstores, he is in talk with publishers. 

“I just want to say that if I, who had no idea about writing books or making comics, with very little time on my hands, could do this, a lot of others who really want to do it, can,” Neil says on a phone call, on a day he is India. He keeps travelling, the job keeps taking him through many flights and hotels. It keeps him away from home for a large part of the year. He wrote his book on those long flights and did research late into the night at hotels. He is now the Managing Director of Nivea India. His 22-year-old career began away from his home in Kochi, where he had once been living with his parents and going to school. “I am a Malayali to start with. But after studying there till I was 17, I became a sort of global nomad,” Neil says. Two MBAs later, he began working in 1996, at first with P&G, travelling between India and Saudi Arabia. Then changing jobs, he worked in Dubai, London and the Netherlands. 

“In 2010, after 15 years, I had a break from working in consumer goods to join a company that managed a consumer goods company,” he says. There was a three-month break during which he found many people — interns, others who worked under him, and even friends — asking him for career advice. “I realised they took notes. They told me it was good advice and I figured may be there is some value in what I said. So I thought, let me write a book,” he says. But when he sat down to write, he realised it was not his thing. He could do business writing, but this was different. So then he thought of a photo book because he was good at photography. Then again, he found there were already many coffee table books and his won’t be unique. That’s when he thought of comics. Neil had always enjoyed them, especially MAD comics and its take on Hollywood, and Asterix comics with its superb detailing.

The idea evolved into fiction on the advice of a friend he met at San Francisco. “He was this literature freak who told me he liked the art and story line. But people don’t read comics for reality. They have to be taken to a different world,” he explains. So Neil set his fictional consumer goods company in central London where he knew he could get an international cast — there is everyone from a Chinese immigrant to a South African. But then one of the main characters — Don — has no nationality, he is universal. Neil has based Don on himself, he says. There are 10 main characters — six interns, a boss, a VP, a marketing director, an ad man, and an ad agency. “It starts with these interns joining the company and goes on till the end of the year, when three of the interns move on to an expat assignment,” he says.