Bhabesh Bhargav joins Dabur India as brand manager

MUMBAI: Three years is not long in FMCG years, but Bhabesh Bhargav has packed enough into his Bajaj Consumer Care stint to fill a career. The brand manager has now moved to Dabur India, a name he says he grew up with, marking both a homecoming of sorts and a genuine step up in scale.

The Bajaj chapter was where Bhargav’s post-MBA education really happened, and the numbers back the claim. As brand manager, he held full P&L ownership of Bajaj’s fastest-growing brand, 100 per cent Pure Coconut Oil, alongside the Amla Range, a portfolio worth upwards of Rs 160 crore in topline. He ran the business end to end, from new launches to pricing and revenue strategy, while coordinating across supply chain, R&D, trade marketing and sales to get three new CNO SKUs onto shelves across general and organised trade.

Before that, as assistant brand manager, Bhargav handled the skin and hair care portfolio under Bajaj Almond Drops, a business worth over Rs 20 crore, launching new body lotion and shampoo lines across ecommerce, modern trade and general trade. He built integrated campaigns across print, digital and television, managed media budgets, and kept a close eye on competitive moves, textbook brand management, executed well.

What makes Bhargav’s profile stand out, though, is the ground-up grounding. Before brand management, he cut his teeth as an area sales manager in North Bengal, running a Rs 20 crore-plus region with 23 distributors and 330 sub-stockists, and even earlier, as a management trainee, rotated through modern trade, sales officer and ISR stints across West Bengal and Odisha, hitting over 100 per cent of target in both urban and rural postings. That is a rare thing in brand management circles: someone who has actually sold the product before he started marketing it. An MBA from NMIMS Mumbai and an earlier internship at Wipro Consumer Care round off a résumé built brick by brick rather than handed on a platter. Dabur gets a brand builder who understands the shop floor as well as the boardroom, a combination that should serve both sides rather well.

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