Brands
Marketing’s Christmas wish: purpose over performance, says Reliance CMO Gayatri Yadav
MUMBAI: Marketing has stuffed its own stocking with metrics—and misplaced its meaning. That, in essence, is the Christmas message from Gayatri Vasudeva Yadav, group chief marketing officer, Reliance, who has issued a sharp year-end wake-up call to an industry she says has forgotten why it exists.
In a candid “Dear Santa” note doing the rounds of the industry, Yadav argues that marketing has boxed itself into tidy but dangerous silos—brand, growth, performance, content—as if each lived on a different planet. They don’t. Or at least, they shouldn’t.
The real job of marketing, she says, is to juggle the now and the next: short-term sales and long-term brand, dashboards and dreams, boardrooms and creative studios. Marketing is not a support act. It is the growth engine—and the conscience—of the business.
In India, the stakes are higher. This is a market built on trust, scale and long memory, where brands are not merely bought but welcomed into homes, festivals and everyday lives. Yet too many marketers, Yadav warns, are optimising for the quarter while quietly eroding the equity that took decades to build.
The irony is glaring. India is at a once-in-a-generation moment to create businesses of global scale and impact. And yet, the number of Indian brands in the global top 100 remains stubbornly small. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so.
Her prescription for 2026 is disarmingly simple: put the customer back at the centre—not as a data point, but as a human being. Remember that growth without respect is brittle, and performance without purpose is fleeting.
Yadav also fires a gentle shot across the AI bow. Yes, artificial intelligence is a force multiplier. No, it is not a substitute for judgment. Data must dance with empathy; logic with imagination.
The closing note is less festive cheer, more alarm bell. If marketing does not reclaim its leadership role, it risks sliding into irrelevance. If it does, Indian marketing can still build global brands that endure—and businesses that scale with trust.
Season’s greetings, then. But consider this less a carol, more a call to arms.
Brands
Tessolve lands a semiconductor veteran to drive its next big push
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, who started his career at ISRO and has spent 35 years building chips and companies, joins the Bengaluru-based firm as president and chief operating officer
BENGALURU: Tessolve has never been shy about its ambitions. The Bengaluru-based engineering services firm already counts 18 of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies among its clients, employs more than 3,500 engineers across 12 countries, and last year pocketed a $150m investment from TPG. Now it has hired the executive it believes can turn those assets into something bigger. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, a 35-year semiconductor veteran who once built satellite payloads for ISRO and has since scaled engineering organisations across three continents, joins as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
THE MAN AND THE MANDATE
The appointment is, by any measure, a serious hire. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu comes to Tessolve after senior leadership stints at HCL Technologies, Altran and Wipro, where he managed large profit-and-loss portfolios and oversaw cross-regional teams. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in bringing more than 1,000 new products to market across the high-tech, energy and manufacturing verticals. Before the private sector claimed him, he began his working life as a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation, contributing to research and development in charge-coupled device technology and satellite payloads, a foundation that shaped everything that followed.
In his new role, he will lead Tessolve’s global growth strategy: expanding its engineering capabilities, deepening customer relationships and accelerating innovation across semiconductor and high-performance computing domains. The brief is broad, but the context is specific. Tessolve operates in the $550 billion global semiconductor market, and its recent moves, the acquisition of Germany’s Dream Chip Technologies and the TPG funding round, have sharpened both its reach and its expectations.
Srini Chinamilli, co-founder and chief executive of Tessolve, is characteristically direct about why Ravi Kumar Chirugudu was the choice:
“As we scale our global semiconductor and system engineering capabilities, Ravi’s appointment marks an important step forward. As global semiconductor demand continues to accelerate across industries, it is creating significant opportunities across the semiconductor lifecycle, from design, packaging, validation and systems integration. Ravi’s deep knowledge and leadership in this ecosystem brings the right mix of industry expertise, customer connect and execution capability, which will play a key role in strengthening our position as a trusted global engineering partner and reinforcing our market leadership.”
THE NEW ARRIVAL SPEAKS
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, for his part, frames the move in terms of timing and culture, two factors that veteran executives tend to weigh as heavily as title or compensation:
“I am happy to join Tessolve at a time when the industry is rapidly evolving towards more complex, AI-driven systems. What stands out to me is its strong people-first culture and its commitment to bringing value to its customers. The strength of its global team, combined with its deep expertise in semiconductor innovation and next-generation product engineering, creates a solid foundation to build differentiated, scalable solutions. I look forward to working closely with the team to drive strategic growth and strengthen its role in shaping the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
The reference to AI-driven systems is not incidental. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a structural reshaping, driven by the insatiable compute demands of artificial intelligence. For engineering services firms like Tessolve, which offers end-to-end capabilities from silicon design to packaged parts and invests in high-performance computing, high-speed interfaces, photonics and 5G, the moment is both an opportunity and a test. The company says it is well positioned to capture the next wave of industry growth. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu is now the person who has to prove it.
He came in from outer space, literally, and spent three decades learning how the semiconductor industry works from the inside out. Now Tessolve is betting that accumulated knowledge can help it cross the next frontier. In the $550 billion global chip market, the gap between ambition and execution is measured in engineering hours and leadership quality. Tessolve has just gone shopping for both.
