Atul Garg, Founder, SingX

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.

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