A book, Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand, written by BusinessLine’s Sr Associate Editor, Vinay Kamath, and published by Hachette India, will be made into a web series.
Anish Chandy, Founder, Labyrinth Literary Agency, said that the book’s audio-visual rights have been placed with a leading production house.
The book, with a foreword by Tata Sons’ Chairman N Chandrasekaran, talks about how a quintessential Indian brand from the house of Tatas reached remarkable heights and in market capitalisation now only next to TCS in the Tata group. The book was unveiled at the Tata Literature Festival in November 2018 and has gone on to be a bestseller.
Based on extensive interviews with Titan executives past and present, including with founding MD, the late Xerxes Desai, the book talks about Titan’s journey over the past three decades—from a company that rivaled watchmaker HMT by launching stylish watches in the late 1980s, and became an instant success—to its transformation to a jewellery maker with Tanishq and youth brand Fastrack, and later with forays into eyewear and sarees with Taneira.
While Titan today is a very successful company, there was a period in the 1990s, when its initial foray into jewellery making didn’t do well, and it made a disastrous foray into the European market with its watches which found poor acceptance, leading to the company being deep in debt.
The book catalogues the turbulent years, the innovation and out of the box thinking which helped turn its fortunes around, making it the success it is today. Pieced together from scores of conversations, the book also has a chapter on Titan’s iconic advertising and how a strand from a Mozart symphony has remained Titan’s signature tune till date, thirty years on.