MAM
Favre-Leuba appoints Vijesh Rajan as business head
MUMBAI: Swiss watch brand Favre-Leuba has announced the appointment of Vijesh Rajan as business head and the new spokesperson for the brand. After the successful tenure of Thomas Morf, the CEO and spokesperson of the brand under whose leadership the brand was relaunched with a modern dynamic outlook yet retaining its rich legacy, Rajan has come on-board with a vision to position Favre-Leuba as an iconic brand in the Swiss watch industry, a status that befits its rich and glorious history and legacy.
He has previously been a part of the parent company of Favre-Leuba and has successfully worked for Titan in the watch industry for close to two decades. Having worked in several leadership positions he has handled multiple facets of the watch industry across all key global markets.
Speaking on his new role, Rajan said: “I’m extremely excited to join the Favre-Leuba team in Switzerland. Favre-Leuba has been working in the last few years to build a solid pipeline of path-breaking products and a strong brand proposition. Over the next few years, I look forward to take the brand to the right markets in the most effective and efficient manner. I resonate with the brand’s aesthetic of Conquering Frontiers and hope to do complete justice to its vision.”
He brings with him a rich experience across sales, distribution, retail, product development, consumer research, marketing, business development, channel & partner management, operations, strategic planning, P&L responsibility, leading diverse teams across multiple International markets, capability and competency development, and more.
His width and depth of skills for managing businesses is seen as pragmatic and positive as Favre-Leuba embarks on conquering new frontiers with him.
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.
