MAM
Favre-Leuba appoints Philippe Roten as CEO
MUMBAI: Favre-Leuba has announced the appointment of Philippe Roten as the new CEO and spokesperson for the brand after the successful tenure of Vijesh Rajan as the brand head. Roten will fully manage Favre-Leuba and lead the transition of the rich history of the brand into a contemporary and exciting future.
Favre Leuba is part of the prestigious Tata Group – a 100-billion-dollar conglomerate, with over a hundred companies across all key continents. Mr Roten brings a wealth of business development experience and significant brand equity building expertise to the company which will be invaluable to the group in this next phase of growth and development.
Roten comes with 18 years of experience in the watch industry which encompasses Retail, Sales, and Commercial Leadership, Managing Brands from the Swatch and LVMH Group, and comes with a strong track record in successfully driving change and improving operating efficiencies.
Speaking on his new role, Philippe Roten said “I look forward to grow the business and brand to great success and celebrate its meritorious achievements with our investors and the team.”
MAM
Smytten appoints Shishir Varma as CEO of Pulseai Research
Rebranded AI platform scales with 150 plus clients and 30 million users.
MUMBAI: In a world obsessed with what consumers say, Smytten is betting on what they actually do. The company has appointed Shishir Varma as chief executive officer of Pulseai Research, signalling a sharper push into AI-led, behaviour-driven consumer insights. The move comes as Smytten rebrands its insights vertical from Smytten PulseAI to Pulseai Research, marking a shift away from traditional, project-based research towards a more continuous, intelligence-led model.
Varma brings over 30 years of global experience across APAC markets, including India, China and Japan. Most recently managing director, Insights at Kantar Japan, he has built and scaled consumer insight businesses across geographies, including playing a key role in establishing Millward Brown in India. His mandate now: turn Pulseai into a category-defining platform in a space still dominated by surveys and static reports.
The pitch is straightforward but ambitious. Instead of relying on claimed responses, Pulseai Research taps into observed behaviour leveraging Smytten’s ecosystem of 30 million users built over a decade of product discovery, trials and purchases. The idea is to close the long-standing gap between what consumers claim and how they actually behave.
The numbers suggest early traction. In under 18 months, the platform has onboarded over 150 enterprise clients across sectors, pointing to growing demand for faster, more reliable alternatives to legacy research models.
Under the hood, the platform blends behavioural data with AI and large language model-led analysis to deliver real-time sentiment tracking, scalable qualitative insights, faster quantitative studies and always-on brand intelligence. In practical terms, that means compressing research timelines from weeks to days without sacrificing depth.
The ambition extends beyond FMCG. Pulseai Research is positioning itself as a cross-category intelligence layer, spanning auto, education, gadgets and emerging consumer segments anywhere behaviour-rich data can sharpen decision-making.
For Smytten, the leadership hire is less about optics and more about direction. With Varma at the helm, the company is leaning into a simple but powerful premise: in the age of AI, insight isn’t just about asking better questions, it’s about watching more closely.
