Atul Sinha, MD, Scarlet Tiger Brand Design and Former VP, BD, Britannia Industries
Started first job with Voltas in Sales. This gave me the opportunity to travel all over India and absorb its diversity and ways of life. Being in Marketing later under the tutelage of Ranjit Salvi developed intellectual acuity and rational thinking. Moved to Cadbury’s as Group Product Manager and later Regional Manager.
Podcast
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Overview
“A conditioned mind is a useless mind” – Atul Sinha
In this episode, Ashutosh Garg engages in an insightful conversation with Atul Sinha, Former VP, BD- Britannia Industries. Atul is an alumnus of XLRI and a yoga enthusiast. The highly successful corporate veteran shares his experiences working with Voltas, Cadbury, Britannia, and Colgate. He talks about his interest in Vedic studies and Yoga. He shares his experience pursuing a Ph.D. in Yoga at this point in life. He talks about his early life and career and how he felt having fifty people reporting to him at the age of 24. Atul shares the three key milestones of his life. He proceeds to share the three pillars of building a brand. He then talks about Vedas, Upanishads, religion, and history. He explains how to classify people into two based on the attainment of spiritual understanding. He discusses the relevance of teaching the ancient scriptures to the younger generation. He emphasizes the importance of character education and the possibilities of incorporating Yoga in the curriculum.
Profile
Started first job with Voltas in Sales. This gave me the opportunity to travel all over India and absorb its diversity and ways of life. Being in Marketing later under the tutelage of Ranjit Salvi developed intellectual acuity and rational thinking. Moved to Cadbury’s as Group Product Manager and later Regional Manager. In terms of learning was exposed to advertising greats like Arun Nanda, Ashok Bijapurkar and Gautam Rakshit. Learnt a lot from them about Marketing and Advertising. Next to Britannia as Marketing Manager. This stint really developed me as a brand strategy expert. Working with the maverick Shombit Sengupta and the qualitative researcher Meena Kaushik helped. We ended up redesigning the brand Britannia and giving it a focus. I also structured the product range by organizing a large portfolio under a few sub-brands. Range architecture is common now but then one had to improvise. Then on to Colgate as Director of Oral care marketing. Here I credit the institution for teaching me rigor and methods. Vikram Kaushik was a Master of Communication and we ended up creating some very effective advertising under his guidance. Our key successes were warding off the threat from Pepsodent at one end and low-priced players at the other end. This helped to reignite the stalled growth and slide in market share. Back to Britannia in 2007 as Vice President. Being in the six-member executive committee gave me a participant’s view of how leadership and strategy work. In 2012 I found myself on my own. Destiny brought me in contact with other extremely talented and like-minded people. We started Scarlet Tiger Brand Design a company involved in brand advisory and strategic packaging design. We have had a good run working on brands like Chandrika, Santoor, Safewash, Cadbury Dairy Milk, Cadbury Silk, Cadbury Éclair, Bournvita, Park Avenue, Bingo, Candiman and Veedol.
