Bloomingdale PR names Parikshit Sharma regional director for Southeast Asia

SINGAPORE: Bloomingdale Public Relations has done something most agencies only talk about: hired outside the PR bubble for a top regional job. Parikshit Sharma, a marketing and brand-activation lifer with two decades across Asia, Africa and Australia, has been named regional director, Southeast Asia, taking charge of the firm’s Singapore headquarters and its push across the region, including the India-Singapore corridor.

The appointment is a deliberate statement of intent. Founder and group ceo Diana Fernandes says the firm looked past conventional PR credentials on purpose, arguing that communications now sits at the crossroads of business, culture, technology, consumer behaviour and reputation, and that leadership needs to reflect that. Sharma fits the brief: stints at DDB Mudra, Ogilvy Action, Wunderman Thompson and Havas Media Group have given him a CV built on brand activation and shopper marketing rather than press releases. At Wunderman Thompson he ran a festival shopper campaign across ten Tata retail brands, including Tanishq, Titan, Croma and Westside. At Ogilvy Action he drove a rural activation for Hindustan Unilever that reached more than four million households. His shopper marketing work at DDB Mudra picked up Gold and Silver at the Abby Awards.

Singapore-based since 2018, Sharma has spent recent years advising ASEAN and Australian brands on retail, activation and digital engagement, including relaunch mandates for Intel and Nokia. That regional fluency is precisely the point. As he puts it, Southeast Asia is not one market but several, each with its own media landscape, consumer behaviour and regulatory quirks, and building a practice that can navigate those differences is now his job.

The move slots into a bigger ambition. Bloomingdale, co-headquartered in Mumbai and Singapore since 2013, already advises more than 40 brands across twelve sectors from offices spanning Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Singapore. Sharma’s brief covers two directions of traffic: helping Indian brands expand into Southeast Asia, and helping international businesses land or scale in India. For a firm chasing a foothold as a connected regional player, that dual mandate, backed by a leader who thinks like a marketer first and a PR person second, looks a shrewd bet.