MAM
Sangita Durbha Gopinath joins Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages as communications head
After eleven years advising brands from the outside, the company’s new external communications chief is now building one from within
BENGALURU: Eleven years is a long stint on any agency roster, and Sangita Durbha Gopinath has just walked out of hers for good. She has joined Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages as national manager, external communications, stepping into the company’s public affairs, communication and sustainability team, known internally as PACS, after more than a decade as director, growth and business initiative at PR Pundit.
The move is, by her own account, less a job change than a career pivot. A week into the role, Gopinath says she can already tell the ride will be an exciting one, swapping the agency seat of advising brands for the harder, messier business of being part of one. For an operator with HCCB’s scale, reach and cultural footprint in India, she argues, the chance to shape and tell its stories is no small thing, and there is, by her own admission, plenty still to build.
Gopinath’s path to Bengaluru via the agency world has taken in a fair spread of sectors along the way. Before her long run at PR Pundit, she held marketing and client engagement roles at Affine Analytics and a brief independent consulting stint, served as vice president at LivLife Hospitals, ran internal communications at HSBC, spent over four years in marketing communications at Apollo HealthHiway, and cut her teeth in public relations at SABMiller, with her earliest professional years in customer care at Reva. It is, on paper, a communications career built across healthcare, finance, analytics, beer and now beverages, hardly the conventional straight line.
She was quick to credit the welcome she received on arrival, thanking Himanshu Priyadarshi for the opportunity and her new PACS colleagues, Chiththarthan Nagarajan, Dikshant Dangwal, Vivek Jha, Tusar Pattnaik, Manoj Kumar Tiwary and Shweta Punetha, for easing her into the first few days.
Whether eleven years of agency-side instincts translate cleanly into client-side reality remains to be seen. But Gopinath is betting they will, and judging by her own telling, she is not looking back.
