During the Christmas season last year, bookstores in the UK did roaring business, for a very unusual reason. They sold huge numbers of colouring books. And here is the interesting thing: These colouring books were not for children, they were targeted at adults. Adult men and women bought millions of colouring books. W.H. Smith, the famous high-street bookstore, reported record festive season sales, attributed to the adult craze for colouring books.

Colouring books mania This remarkable craze has now spread far and wide. On Amazon’s online bookstore, the top ten selling titles globally now include at least one colouring book. With names such as The Secret Garden , Animal Kingdom and Enchanted Forest , these books invite you to colour their pages with pencils or crayons. The Secret Garden , by the Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford, has sold an amazing 1.5 million copies, and other colouring books are not far behind in the race.

In France, where people are obsessed with fine food, more colouring books were sold last year than cookbooks – a data point which speaks volumes.

The rush for colouring books has in turn led to a totally unanticipated global shortage of colour pencils, with brands such as Faber Castell and Staedtler having to increase their production runs sharply. In offices and homes worldwide, people are spending hours colouring books. In recent days, this craze has also entered India, with reputed publishers launching adult colouring books with distinctly Indian themes. Two such popular titles are Bhag-e-Bahar: A Mughal Garden and The Sita Colouring Book , which reassuringly tells us that this interesting genre is colour-blind to religion and culture.

What has made millions of normal adults turn to colouring books, to engage in an activity which is normally associated with children? It turns out that the answer is contained in this question. Adults greatly desire to engage in activities which are childish, and which are normally undertaken by children. The behavioural economist Michal Ann Strahilevitz sums it up beautifully when she says, “Every grown-up has an inner child that just wants to play, and colouring books are perfect for that.”

The child in every adult Let’s explore this thought a little further, because it holds the nugget of a wonderful marketing insight. Adults often need to forget the complex problems of their grown-up world, including the stresses of the workplace, recurring money issues and messy relationships. An excellent way of switching off from adult complexities and forgetting these problems for a while is to turn into children for a few minutes, or a few hours. And we can turn into children if we do what children do, such as colouring books.

In fact, children are very happy when they have something simple to focus on – such as colouring, or playing with a toy, or knocking a ball around.

Quite similarly, colouring gives the adult mind a simple thing to focus on, to the exclusion of everything else. In addition, colouring with pencils takes us back to our idyllic days as children, when we would happily colour our books with crayons all over, without having to worry about sales targets or EMI payments. So there is the pleasant nostalgia of carefree childhood which accompanies this activity. And to top it all, colouring is an act of spontaneous and stress-free creativity, which is always a happy attribute that we associate with the child within us. No wonder most adult colouring books call themselves “Anti-stress art therapy for busy people”. When adults find a way to release the inner child which resides within them, they also cast all their stress away, at least for a limited time.

Kung Fu Panda & cone ice-cream Let us consider a few other successful products and brands which have a similar impact upon us. My wife tells me that she feels like a liberated child each time she watches Kung Fu Panda , the movie series that features the bumbling, portly, childish Panda called Po. The adventures of this accident-prone Panda, who aspires to be a kung fu master, transport her to a world of childish happiness and peace. Because of this reason, she is very happy to watch the movie time and again. No wonder Kung Fu Panda 3 , the latest version of this movie, has just had a very successful opening weekend. I am sure it is helping release the inner child in millions of adults, in India and elsewhere.

I think Cadbury’s chocolate eclairs and Amul Ice-cream both have a similar impact on me. I associate the joyous acts of sinking my teeth into soft gooey eclairs, or slowly licking on a cone of ice-cream, with happy moments of my childhood in Madurai. When I am busy devouring a cone of Amul’s delicious butterscotch ice-cream, I am oblivious to everything else around me. If I am on the road while I am eating this, I notice a special spring in my step. I can’t help smiling as I savour the cold, soft and creamy cone. Often, ice-cream drips down my face. For those few moments, I think I shed most of my 53 years, and become a carefree child once again.

What this means is that all these diverse products – movies like Kung Fu Panda , chocolates and ice-creams, colouring books and comics, bicycles and holiday packages – can succeed best if all elements of their marketing mix are designed to draw out the child in each adult. Packaging, external graphics, product design, advertising – they all have to converge on creating a happy middle ground where child and adult can come together seamlessly. Perhaps the only “P” of the marketing mix that can be more adult than child in its construct is the dimension of price, because adults are likely to have more money to spend than children, particularly if it is for a craze that they cannot resist.

For the child within you There are many other things that brands can do to trigger the inner child within each of us. Here are a few pointers, and ideas. Consumer studies show that one of the most satisfying little things in life, which takes us back to childhood, is the act of popping bubble wrap packaging. The satisfying popping sound we hear, as we compress and burst each of the bubbles in this transparent plastic packaging material, apparently leads to a feeling of child-like achievement.

Many products can consider the use of bubble wrap, either as packaging or as interesting add-ons to the core product.

Brands can also consider designing exciting promotional programmes that help release the inner child. Many of us will recall the huge success of the Ice Bucket Challenge, which involved dumping a bucket of ice-cold water on someone’s head, to promote awareness of and donations to research into a disease called ALS. The act of dumping water was full of child-like spontaneous joy, because this sudden and simple act is so childlike in its essence. This is a key reason why this challenge went viral during 2014, and donations to the cause soared. There are many similar childlike promotions that brands can consider to engage their customers, including the use of virtual pets, pillow fights or nursery rhymes.

On a broader point, I think most great marketers have a child-like curiosity about the world and people around them. This enables them to observe and learn with new eyes, unlike the jaded senses that adults often use to experience the world. Perhaps a good step forward to develop this childlike interest would be to pick up that adult colouring book, and get going with your crayons. When we play in our secret childhood gardens, we are likely to emerge happy, curious and creative.

Harish Bhat is author of Tata Log: Eight modern stories from a timeless institution. These are his personal views. bhatharish@hotmail.com. The author acknowledges valuable inputs from Jude Rodrigues, Tata Sons in the writing of this article

The author is MEMBER, GROUP EXECUTIVE COUNCIL, TATA SONS

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