Mr. Vijay Xavier
Exec. VP, RK Swamy BBDO, India
Profile: Vijay Xavier has a long and colourful career in advertizing. He is an economics graduate from Madras University. He began his career with the Tamil Nadu Tourism Development Corporation, working as an executive assistant to the chairman in 1971.
Soon after, he dived into the advertizing domain by moving to Lowe Lintas as a junior account executive in 1973. Mr. Xavier always kept with the times, updating himself with relevant knowledge and current techniques. While in Lintas, he completed a course in Marketing Management for Young Executives conducted by Madras Management Association, under Lintas’ corporate sponsorship scheme. He was also trained at the Campaign Planning Workshop for the Asia-Pacific region of Lintas Worldwide at Kuala Lumpur.
He is also an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad, where he had completed a residential specialty course on product policy and new product management under IIM-A’s management development programme.
He spent a good nineteen years with Lintas, handling portfolios for a plethora of products. He oversaw and co-ordinated advertizing for everything from tea and tyres to financial services and floor tiles.
He then left
Lintas for a brief period of four years, during which he
worked as publisher and chief executive of Star TV
Guide. Heeding to the call of the advertizing industry
again, he then returned to Lowe Lintas, where he served as the vice president of Lintas Worldwide, and head of Lintas Chennai. His responsibilities include strategic planning and developing communication for several mega MNC’s brands, talent training and development and new business development.
He was also an event management specialist and headed the event management cell of Lintas India. The largest ever rural event in Asia for TAFE tractors is credited to him.
Currently he is the Exec. VP of RK Swamy BBDO, India.
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Dr. Pradeep Kumar V
Director, Fidelity Investments, Bangalore
Profile: Pradeep Kumar specializes in marketing analytics and operations management. He graduated from Central College, Bangalore and is also a product of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He kick-started his career as a Senior Customer Engineer in Larsen and Toubro Ltd. He also worked at GE Capital and Genpact for a combined six and a half years, after which he shifted to Fidelity Business Services in 2007, where he was assigned the role of the Director.
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Mr. Murali Sundar
Country Manager, Schwarzkopf India, Henkel
Profile: Mr. Murali Sundar’s experience in marketing has been conceived and nurtured by the consumer goods industry. He graduated from Anna University and then finished his MBA from the University of Madras in Sales and Marketing. He then kicked off his career as the area sales manager in ITC Ltd. He then moved to Cavin Care as an Area Manager in 1999. While leaving the company in 2004, he had the experience enough to shoulder the responsibility of the role of Country Manager.
He then moved to Cholayil as the Head of Sales and Marketing, where he remained for about three and a half years, after which he finally joined Henkel Adhesives Technologies in 2008, where he now bears the role of General Manager.
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Mr. Sakthi Velan S
DGM, Business Planning, Toyota Kirloskar Motors Pvt.
Ltd.
Profile: Mr. S. Sakthi Velan has an illustrious and multi-faceted career that has continually prepared him for the responsibility of product design. He is a graduate in Mechanical engineering with a specialization in automobile technology.
He started out his career in Force Motors Limited (formerly Bajaj Tempo Limited) in Indore as a quality control engineer. Later, he moved on to Volvo Eicher Commercial Vehicles (then Eicher Motors) where he served as senior engineer for product engineering. At Volvo Eicher, he worked on several export projects including left-hand driven trucks and mini-buses. He then jumped to Mahindra & Mahindra, Nasik, where he held the post of section executive of vehicle evaluation, which came under the company’s primary R&D wing.
Finally, in 1998, he began his stint in Toyota Kirloskar Motors Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, where he is the Deputy General Manager. He was with the product design and development division for twelve years since his inception, after which he moved to the business planning wing. His responsibilities, while with product design & development included vehicle regulation and certification and energy research and product planning for alternative fuel vehicles among others. While in this division, he enhanced his knowledge in the field by working for a year with Toyota
Technical Center in Japan as an intra-company transferee.
His current responsibilities under the business planning wing include working as the technical secretariat to the top management, future project planning and corporate planning.
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Mr. Mohan Babu
Country Head-Marketing, Khazana Jewellers
Profile: Mr. Mohan Babu has a fair amount of experience in brand development & management and retail marketing. He is an alumnus of our own Department of Management Studies (DoMS), National Institute of Technologoy, Trichy (NIT-T). He is also a graduate in mechanical engineering from Anna University.
He has worked at several big-name companies over the course of his career. He started out with a two year stint at Cavin Care as a Product Executive, and it has been a phenomenal upward spiral for Mr. Babu’s career from there. He has taken up considerable responsibilities at Sara Lee, having worked there for a grand total of about five years, overseeing brand management and marketing of Kiwi Shoe Polish. He then moved to Cholayil, where he was assigned the role of Category Manager. Here, he was in charge of marketing of Cuticura talcum powder.
Finally, he shifted to Khazana Jewellery, initially as Senior Marketing Manager and later as the Deputy General Manager of Marketing, which is the role he currently holds since 2010.
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Dr. Ravi Vijayaraghavan
VP & Global Head, 24/7 Customer
Profile: Dr. Ravi Vijayaraghavan comes from a bright and promising academic background. He’s an engineering graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He then went on to complete a doctorate in engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. His research during this period was of interest to, and was subsequently funded by the National Science Foundation. After this, he did a post-graduate MBA degree in Finance and Strategy in 2004 from the University of Michigan’s Stephen M Ross School of Business. He has a record of obtaining distinctions, and he also won the Core Scholar award from the University of Michigan.
He was a post-doctoral researcher for Ford Motor, where he developed and implemented mathematical models for engineering design which later resulted in a US patent. He then moved on to become a Research Scientist for Ford Motor, a position he occupied for nearly five years. At this time, he was responsible for all environment-friendly material technologies in Ford’s Model U. He worked at one of the premier corporate research labs in the world, and his research focused on mathematical modeling and optimization.
He was later assigned the role of Strategic Business Modeling Manager in Ford Motor where he introduced the application and use of system dynamics modeling in strategy and organization design. Following his stint at Ford which collectively lasted about eight years, he shifted to 24/7 Customer, a privately held off-shoring industry as the Assistant vice President. Here, he founded the analytics practice for 24/7 Customer. Here, he was responsible for overseeing development and delivery of solutions for several verticals like web retailing and financial services using a host of analytics techniques and predictive models.
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