Karan Kumar exits Hero Realty to build his own advisory shop

NEW DELHI: Marketers who spend a quarter of a century fixing other people’s brands eventually ask themselves an obvious question: why not just do it for everyone at once. Karan Kumar has clearly asked it. The chief marketing officer has wrapped up his stint at Hero Realty and is now laying the groundwork for an independent advisory platform built around business growth, marketing transformation and leadership, a bet that his experience travels better as counsel than as a job title.

The Hero Realty chapter was no small posting. Kumar used his time there to sharpen the company’s marketing function, tighten its brand strategy and push its digital capabilities forward, work that sits squarely within a career built on doing exactly that across very different industries. Before Hero Realty he held leadership roles at ITC, Fabindia, DLF and ART Fertility Clinics, a spread that runs from consumer goods to real estate to healthcare, and few marketers can claim to have driven growth across quite so wide a canvas.

That breadth is precisely the currency Kumar now wants to put to work independently. Rather than taking up another single mandate, he is exploring new opportunities while building an advisory platform aimed at businesses navigating growth and transformation, the same problems he has spent 25 years solving from the inside. Details of the platform and its collaborations are expected over the coming months, but the direction of travel is clear: Kumar is betting that his value lies less in any one chief marketing officer chair and more in the pattern recognition built across four very different sectors.

Kumar himself frames the move as continuity rather than departure. “The most rewarding part of my career has been helping organizations navigate moments of growth and transformation,” he said. “This next chapter is about bringing those experiences to a wider set of businesses while remaining open to opportunities where I can help create meaningful business impact at scale.”

It is a well-timed move. Indian businesses across sectors are hunting for marketing leadership that understands transformation rather than just campaigns, and an experienced hand offering that counsel independently, unencumbered by a single employer’s agenda, is a proposition plenty of boards will find hard to ignore. Further announcements on the advisory platform and its collaborations are expected later this year, and Kumar’s next chapter looks set to be considerably wider than his last.