Speaker Bio:  

Harish Bijoor
Brand Expert & CEO, Harish Bijoor consults
Harish Bijoor is currently a Brand Domain specialist operating out of Bangalore. He runs a unique boutique consulting outfit branded “Harish Bijoor Consults”, a brand name that has a consulting presence across the markets of Hong Kong, Seattle, London and the Indian sub-continent. He spent the most recent 18 months of his career as the Chief Operating Officer, Zip Telecom Limited. He has spent the last eight years prior to his Telecom stint with Tata Coffee Limited in various designations moving through the Brand Management and Marketing Hierarchy. Harish spent the first eight years of his career with Brooke Bond Lipton India Limited (now Hindustan Lever Limited) moving through the Sales and Distribution stream during the first four years and the Brand Management stream in the next four. Brands handled: Teas: Red Label, Special, Super Dust, 3 Roses, Taj Mahal. Coffees: Bru, Deluxe Green Label, Tripti, Café, etc. Harish is an actively sought public speaker in the country at forums that relate to General Management, Marketing, Sales, Retailing, Consumer Behaviour, Techno-branding and allied areas. Harish has recently published a book titled, “Marketing Trends – Smart Insights into the world of Indian Business”. He is currently involved in his second book on core-branding. The book is titled, “Brand Irrationals: a fundamental journey into brand-think”. Harish has published papers extensively on the subjects relating to Strategic Marketing, Branding, Consumer Behaviour, Retail networks, Rural marketing, Marketing research and Trend-analysis. Harish Bijoor contributes regularly to Business publications on Branding, sales, distribution and related topics.
Jessie Paul
Managing Director, Paul Writer
Jessie Paul is the managing director of Paul Writer, a marketing advisory firm she founded in early 2010 that works with clients in the B2B, services and technology space to create optimal marketing plans. Her current area of focus is understanding how firms can leverage digital marketing in conjunction with traditional or heritage media to create meaningful relationships with their audience. Previously, as Chief Marketing Officer of Wipro’s IT business and as Global Brand Manager at Infosys, Jessie Paul has been recognized for her contribution towards putting the Indian IT industry on the global map. Her efforts at Infosys earned her the Chairman’s Award and also the Diamond Award from IT Services Marketing Association, US. With over 15 years in services marketing, including a stint with Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, Jessie is considered an expert in brand globalization and has been named one of the most influential business women in the Indian IT industry. She has published articles on marketing and branding in various leading publications, and is a regular columnist for INC, India and BusinessWorld.in. In 2009, she authored a book “No Money Marketing,” which became Tata McGraw-Hill’s fastest selling professional book. www.paulwriter.com is one of India’s largest professional community sites with over 1500 marketers, and she hosts a LinkedIn group for senior marketers which was included in LinkedIn’s Hall of Fame. She has been a speaker on the topic of brand internationalization at various conferences in India and overseas, including Forbes Executive Women’s Forum, CII Marketing Summit, Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network, and ITSMA Annual Marketing Conference. She is a regular columnist for businessworld.in and Inc India. Jessie Paul holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta and earned a bachelor&rsquot;s degree in computer science and engineering from National Institute of Technology (NIT), Trichy.
Vijay Gopal VV
President - South & East, RK Swamy BBDO
Vijay heads the offices in Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. An Electronics Engineer by qualification, Vijay has done his post graduation in management from IIM, Ahmedabad. He is also an SMP post graduate from the Omnicom University and has trained on the BBDO Tools at the Marketing Sciences Department in BBDO New York. He is closely involved with his clients in the development of communication programs, guides account management teams to craft brand strategy. In his 24 years of experience, he has worked on clients like SONY, Citizen, Henkel, Sara Lee, Mars Chocolates, Maxis Aircel Telecom, Fujitsu, Apollo, AMP Sanmar amongst others.
Jagannath A L
Director Marketing, VMware India
In his current role Jagannath leads the Marketing for VMware in India and SAARC region. He is responsible for all communication and demand generation activities. He focuses on creating mindshare for all VMware technologies and solutions in the Cloud Computing space. Before joining VMware, Jagannath was General Manager Marketing for the Systems and Storage business at Sun Microsystems in India. He was also the Lead for the systems marketing for the Emerging Markets. Jagannath has about 17years of well rounded marketing experience. He has worked in Satyam, Reliance and Mudra Communications before and has held important roles in these organizations. Jagannath holds a degree in Physics with Honors and a PDGM from XIM Bhubaneswar.
Valerie Rozycki Wagoner
Founder & CEO, ZipDial
Valerie R. Wagoner is Founder & CEO of ZipDial, an innovative mobile engagement platform based on "missed calls". The company, founded out of India where Valerie has spent half of her career, is building services that are the simplest and lowest cost for both the mass market of end users as well as both large and small businesses. Before ZipDial, Valerie served as Head - Strategic Initiatives at mChek, the market leading mobile payments provider in India. There she was solely responsible for building the business for the Bottom of the Pyramid mass market segment and services to bank the unbanked. Valerie built the BOP business from scratch, driving product development based on in-depth customer research as well as launching the services into the market with new banking and telecom partnerships. Valerie&rsquot;s early career was spent in the Silicon Valley where at eBay she led product management and marketing initiatives for local trade as well as cross-border trade. Before that she served as a founding team member of two startups, Ning and SayNow, helping both companies launch into the market. Valerie earned both her Bachelors in Public Policy and Masters in Economic Sociology from Stanford University where she graduated with Honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Valerie is a published writer on her independent research on microfinance in India and South America as well as an invited speaker to a variety of international forums for her work with technologies that empower the mass market. In 2010, Valerie was a top three finalist in the pan-India competition for entrepreneurs, “The Pitch” on Bloomberg UTV. Valerie was also awarded the Leading Woman in Technology Award 2011 by the Women in Leadership Forum, an award selected from nominations from all of India.
Viswa Pratap Desu
Vice President - Sales & Marketing, Brigade Enterprises
Viswa Pratap Desu has over 23 years work experience out of which 14 years has been in Real Estate in Residential, Office Space and Retail Mall Sales & Leasing in Mumbai and Bangalore he is currently the Vice President – Sales for Brigade Enterprises, Bangalore. His previous assignments in real estate have been as General Manager (Mktg) in IDEB Construction, Bangalore and Head-Residential Sales, Head-Customer Care in Tata Housing Development, Mumbai and has also handled assignments in Marketing of Petroleum Products and Consumer Electronics. He has Successfully marketed the Integrated lifestyle enclave, Brigade Gateway which consists of 1250 luxury and super-luxury apartments, World Trade Centre (Office space), an upcoming Mall – Orion Mall, Hospital, Sheraton Hotel, School and a Club also, responsible for leasing of prime Commercial Space to clients such as Amazon, KPMG, Siemens, Samsung, Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young and Volvo. He has completed B.Sc. (Hons) from Delhi University and holds an MBA from Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, U.P.
Prasad Hebbar
Senior Director, Fidelity Investments
Prasad Hebbar is currently Senior Director at Fidelity Investments. Prior to Fidelity he was associated with IBM Global Services and Citibank. Prasad has completed his Bachelor of Technology from IIT, Bombay and also holds a PGDBM from XLRI, Jamshedpur.
Peter Yorke
CEO, Yorke Communications
Peter is founder and CEO at Yorke Communications Private Limited, an organization that builds content marketing programs for both internal and external audiences. Peter strongly believes that the basis for generating leads, building market image or cementing relations with customers and employees is through good and sustained content programs. In the last 3 years of operations, Yorke Communications has acquired a bouquet of marquee clients in the marketing and communications space. Peter was Vice President – Marketing and Communications at Oracle Financial Services (formerly i-flex solutions), a global, Oracle majority owned, financial services software provider. He was directly responsible for the marketing and communications function and ran a virtual and global communications team. Earlier Peter worked with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro Systems – among the top software exporters from India. Peter is also Director on the board of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), a SFO headquartered global body of nearly 15,000 professionals. Peter has a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Bombay and a Diploma in Journalism from the Bombay College of Journalism.
Raghu B Viswanath
Founder & Managing Director, Verterbrand
Raghu Viswanath did his Bachelor’s in Technology from I.I.T. Chennai. He followed this up with a PGDM from I. I. M. Kolkota. He has had over 20 years of experience in the corporate world, specializing in Managing Brands, at both Smith Kline Beecham Consumer Healthcare & TITAN Industries. He founded Vertebrand Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd., in end – 1999. Vertebrand is arguably, India’s foremost Brand Consulting firm advising a host of large Indian corporates and MNCs in building brand equity in India. Raghu is also a guest faculty at a member of premier management institutes as well as a corporate trainer.
Sandeep Verma
Marketing Director, Unilever
Sandeep Verma has over 11 years of experience working in Hindustan Unilever Ltd. In this time, he has handled various roles across sales, customer development and brand management . In his brand stint over the last 7 years he has worked with various kinds of consumers while handling brands like Sunsilk, Lifebuoy , Vim , Domex and Cif. Sandeep is deeply passionate about brand visioning, new product development, communication campaign development, market development modules and digital marketing. One of the biggest success stories in his brand stint was his creation of Sunsilk Gang of Girls in 2006 which became Asia’s largest social media site for women very soon. He also led Lifebuoy’s pioneering work in changing the hand hygiene habits of consumers globally which also led to the brand getting an entry into the Guiness book of world records twice. In his current role, Sandeep is the Marketing Director for the household care category , a Euro 200mn category for Unilever, across Asia. Sandeep is an engineer from NIT –Allahabad and a post graduate from IIM-Lucknow.
Rameet Arora
Senior Director Marketing, McDonald’s India
With over thirteen years of experience in the field of advertising and marketing with some of the leading organizations in the industry, Rameet Arora, joined Hard Castle Restaurants Sr. Director Marketing for McDonalds in mid 2010. In his role, Rameet’s mandate is to drive consumer centric growth for brand and business. Over the years Rameet has been associated with leading advertising and marketing companies in India, most notably Leo Burnett, where he spent over eight years. His immediate previous appointment was as Head Marketing for Colors, a leading television channel in the country. Rameet grew up in Delhi and is a graduate in Economics from St Stephen’s College. Rameet is an MBA from NMIMS Mumbai. He is a self-confessed foodie, loves travelling and is passionate about sport
Balaji Kesavaraj
Director - Marketing, Microsoft Corporation
Highly motivated, creative and versatile global leader with over 14 years of experience in marketing, brand management & communication. Especially skilled at building effective, productive working relationships with both internal and external stake holders. Strategist who will achieve results. Committed to the highest levels of professional excellence and ability to lead from the front. His specialities include:360 Brand management, IT Services marketing, Solution & Product marketing, Strategic planning, Deep understanding of the APAC market, PR & Analyst relationship, People Management, Market Research and Analysis, Channel & Retail marketing, B2B & internal communication, Cloud computing/SaaS specialist, Experiential marketing & community building, Online marketing including SEO & SEM, Brand Launch and Activation including events, outdoor and retail communication.
Stanley Rao
Chairman & Founder, Champions Group
Stanley Rao is the Chairman and Founder of Champions Group. A Multi National Global conglomerate with over 200 crores in Revenue and forays into Marketing Outsourcing, Digitization and New Age Integrated Data and Digital marketing solutions. Mr. Rao is inching towards celebrating two decades of driving global business change with experience in Digital Marketing and Strategic Solutions space..He is the Man known to have pioneered "Marketing Outsourcing" and is Founder of numerous Digital Marketing brands world wide. Over the years, Champions Group has grown to over a 1500 people group and diversified into various business sectors. Mr. Rao is recipient of several honors and awards. Named one of the “100 Most Influential Global Sales & Marketing Technology Leaders” by Marketing Times.He has given keynote speeches at Search Marketing Summit, Global CLO Summit, TFM&A, CEO Marketing Summit, etc.
N Sekar
VP Marketing, Jagran Prakashan
Started his career with The Times of India, Kolkatta and major part of his service is with the language media – Anandabazar Patrika, Chitralekha and Dainik Jagran. With Jagran Prakashan Ltd., for the past twelve years and currently in the role of Vice President – Marketing [South]. Launched Jagran City Plus, a community paper outside Jagran’s footprint. He is a member in the Core Committee of Jagran Prakashan Ltd., Also, instrumental in starting Media Association of Bangalore with his friends from the media fraternity.
Ramanujam Sridhar
CEO, Brand-Comm
Ramanujam Sridhar is a communication consultant, author, columnist, teacher, trainer, cricket enthusiast and a passionate social activist. A postgraduate in Management from IIM Bangalore and an MA in Economics from Loyola College, Chennai, Sridhar had spent over six years in the banking industry, and in his own words “counted other people’s money and wrote other people’s Fixed Deposit receipts” before entering the fascinating and often frustrating world of advertising. After completing over 25 years in the business and holding high-profile positions such as CEO of Pratibha Advertising( now Quadrant), Executive Director, RK Swamy BBDO and Executive Vice President, Mudra Communications, Sridhar founded Brand-comm, in 1998. Brand-Comm is a niche communications company headquartered in Bangalore with seven offices pan-India. Its range of services include brand consulting, advertising and public relations. Several well known brands such as the Future Group, MetLife and Dalmia cements are clients of Brand-Comm. He has authored three books - “One land one billion minds’, a best seller in India and its sequel “Googly Branding on Indian turf’. He recently launched his third book in Tamil ‘En Vazhi Thani Vazhi’ and is now writing a text book on advertising and brand management. A professionally trained counselor, Sridhar helps and guides many distressed individuals at Vishwas a well-known voluntary organization in Bangalore. He is a trustee of Vishranti, an organization committed to helping senior citizens. He is involved with ‘Prerana’ an organization which helps deserving children to go to college. A part of the proceeds of the royalty of the book “Googly” will go to this cause.
Ajay Kaul
Executive Director Global Brand Communications, Lenovo
Ajay Kaul is Executive Director, Global Brand Communications, in Lenovo. He has more than 18 years of global marketing andexecutive management experience and has been with Lenovo since 2006 Ajay is currently based in Bangalore, on assignment from Lenovo, and manages the Global Brand communications and Analytics hub of over 150 people, which is responsible for developing marketing communications for 50+ countries. In this role Ajay oversees the Lenovo global brand, operations and analytics teams and is also responsible for managing the Ogilvy advertising unit serving Lenovo for its global brand communications and advertising needs. Prior to relocating to Bangalore, Ajay was based out of Lenovo’s global headquarters in Morrisville North Carolina USA, where he was managing Lenovo’s Global Direct Marketing and Business Intelligence functions. In this role he was responsible for driving the strategy and enablement of cloud based CRM systems and building a global direct marketing platform. He played a leadership role in building a business intelligence infrastructure for Lenovo’s US business and helpedalign Lenovo’s sales strategy based on BI. Kaul joinedLenovo from Dell, where he was based out of Dell’s global headquarters in Round Rock Texas. He served at Dell for over eight years and held the role of head of marketing for Dells’ Public Sector division in Americas. He has also held various roles at Dell including Brand Management, Marketing Ops and Pricing functions. Kaul played a key role in establishing Dell as a #1 SMB brand in the PC category in North America. An MBA graduate of the Carlson School of Management at University of Minnesota, Kaul also has an undergrad degree in Electronics and Telecommunications engineering from India’s National Institute of technology Srinagar and has attended executive education programs at University of Texas, Austin.
Eswara VAN Sharma
Head- Marketing, NVIDIA India
Eswara VAN Sharma is a marketing and communications professional with over 17 years of experience in marketing, innovation, international business, advertising and communications in India and the Middle East. He currently heads Marketing at NVIDIA India, and was previously leading the Innovation and International Marketing functions at United Breweries. Earlier, VAN has led the strategic planning function for McCann Erickson, and has worked in various capacities for DDB Dubai, Digital Equipment India and Mudra, where he was extensively involved in managing technology and IT clients. VAN is an Environmental Engineering graduate and an MBA in Marketing and Systems from Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.
Nalin R Khanna
President, Vertebrand
As President of Vertebrand, Nalin is in complete charge of Vertebrand&rsquot;s day-to-day operations. Nalin has over 3 decades of work experience having held Board - level positions across companies like ITC Agri. Biz., Dabur, EID Parry as well as Best & Crompton Engg. Nalin is also a seasoned international marketer having widely travelled and worked in many developed economies. Nalin is also the driving force behind project delivery and the mentor for Knowledge and talent growth at Vertebrand.
Sanjay Seth
Vice President – Global Marketing & Communications, Mahindra Satyam
After completing his schooling in Delhi and graduating from Delhi University, Sanjay completed his PG Diploma in Systems Management and followed it through with an MBA in Marketing & Finance. Sanjay currently heads a team of 50+ core marketing professional globally. He is responsible for Business Enablement Marketing across all Industry Verticals and Competencies including Global Field Marketing, Analyst & Advisory Relations, Direct Marketing, Media Relations and Customer Intimacy Programs. Sanjay started his career with NIIT and worked there for 3 years. He joined Wipro Technologies after completing his MBA and worked there for 19 years in IT Products & Services, Global Sales, Marketing and Alliances Management. Sanjay worked extensively in India, US and Europe across several verticals and service lines. During his association with Wipro, he received multiple awards from Wipro and internationally, for Wipro. He has 3 Business Process Innovations accredited to him in Wipro. His innovations have been actively deployed to generate non-linear business revenues, even till today.