Marketing education often operates between two worlds. In classrooms, students learn frameworks, models and case studies that explain how brands grow and sustain relevance. In markets, however, the realities of brand building are often far more complex, shaped by culture, behaviour, economic conditions and institutional context. Books that successfully bridge these two worlds are relatively rare.

BRANDSUTRA 2.0 by Ujaya Shakya makes a meaningful attempt to do precisely that. From an academic perspective, the book is particularly valuable because it emerges from practice. Drawing on more than two decades of experience in Nepal’s marketing and advertising industry, the author reflects on how brands evolve in emerging markets where consumer decisions are influenced by social, cultural and emotional factors. For those of us who teach advertising and brand marketing across business schools in Nepal, one of the recurring challenges in the classroom is contextual relevance. Many widely used marketing textbooks are written primarily for western markets. Their frameworks remain useful but their examples and assumptions do not always reflect the dynamics of smaller culturally complex markets like Nepal.

In this sense, BRANDSUTRA 2.0 fills an important gap. This book situates marketing within the lived context of Nepal while connecting these observations to broader developments across emerging South Asian markets. This regional perspective is particularly important for students who are preparing to work in economies where rapid change, technological adoption and cultural continuity coexist.