SAGE India has recently published 'Troll Proof Branding in the Age of Doppelgangers' by Dr Gaurav Sood, Professor of Marketing at Amity University.

This book comes as a tome on the unique pop culture phenomenon known as Brand Doppelganger. Published under SAGE India’s business imprint Response, this book explores the psychological and behavioural aspects of consumers and the competing brands in the online space. It delves deep into the mechanisms of Fake News, Culture Jamming, Brand Hacktivism, and Trolling by citing real-life case studies of personal and corporate brands like Rahul Gandhi, Facebook, IPL, Starbucks, Nike, and others.

Announcing its release, the author says, “This book analyses various forms of consumer backlash and anti-brand activism and how culture jamming, fake news, trolling, and hacktivism create the brand doppelganger imagery and try to destroy the cultural ideology and reputation of the brand both offline and online. With this book, I offer insights to marketers, readers, and management students on how the brand doppelganger imagery can be created, measured, and managed by learning through various instances and case studies of top global brands. For instance, the types of trolls and fake news emerging in the digital era (especially during and post COVID19) are at an all-time high but all trolls and their attacks are not the same. For the layman, I detail out their categories in the book such as the persistent debate troll, grammar and spell check troll, forever offended troll, blabbermouth troll, exaggeration, off-topic, and greedy spammer troll.”

In his foreword to the book, Dr Annurag Batra (Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, BW Businessworld Media Group and Exchange4Media Media Group) writes: “We all work towards developing and growing ourselves and the way Gaurav has planned his transition from corporate to academia is commendable. Gaurav is never satisfied by learning about one side of the coin, and he believes in flipping and studying the other side too. [He]  deserves kudos for articulating a  playbook or brand reference book for building  brands  in  a  D2C  economy. Read this book to know how brands can build and safeguard their brand reputation in the age of brand doppelgangers.”