Unnikrishnan Pillai promoted to deputy head of digital, international, at Malabar Gold & Diamonds

Mumbai: Unnikrishnan Pillai has been elevated to deputy head of digital marketing, international, at Malabar Gold & Diamonds, capping a steady climb through the jewellery major’s global marketing operation.

Pillai has spent just over three years at Malabar, having joined in July 2023 as lead for digital marketing on the international business. In that role he ran digital strategy across a sprawling patch of markets, the Gulf, North America, Europe, South-East Asia and Australia and New Zealand, overseeing everything from search and social to programmatic advertising for a brand that sells high-ticket luxury jewellery to both the Indian diaspora and local shoppers. Festival season was his proving ground: campaigns spanning Akshaya Tritiya, Diwali, Eid, Black Friday and Thanksgiving, coordinated across time zones that rarely cooperate.

Before Malabar, Pillai cut his teeth in Dubai as digital marketing manager at OGPay, and earlier still built an agency career in Mumbai, rising from account manager to senior account director at Brandmovers India and Blink Digital, working accounts for KFC, ICICI Bank, Asus and Yatra.com along the way.

In his new role, Pillai will lean on that agency-honed instinct for performance marketing to sharpen Malabar’s push into AI-driven, first-party-data marketing, the kind of personalisation luxury retail now takes for granted.

From account manager to deputy head of digital in a little over a decade, Pillai’s rise reads like a masterclass in patient, campaign-by-campaign graft. The gold standard, it turns out, was set one festival calendar at a time.