Mayank Kumar joins IndiGo as head of content and creative

DELHI: Career moves rarely come with a better tagline than “ready for take off”, but Mayank Kumar has earned the pun. After roughly two months settling in, he has joined IndiGo, InterGlobe Aviation’s ubiquitous carrier, as head of content and creative, a role that puts him in charge of shaping how India’s largest airline talks to its passengers, its culture and, increasingly, itself.

The path here is a study in consumer internet range. Kumar cut his teeth as a copywriter at Vigilante Communication before spending over two years as an editor on the travel desk at Times Internet, home of the Times of India. From there he joined MakeMyTrip, staying put for nearly nine years and climbing the full ladder from senior executive to senior manager in content marketing, along the way leading a team of a dozen copywriters and building acquisition and retention strategy for the online travel giant’s various customer cohorts. Barely a year ago he took a sharp turn into fintech, joining MobiKwik as head of content, an associate director role spanning brand, social, CRM and app content.

That fintech stint, brief but broad, is what makes the IndiGo appointment interesting. At MobiKwik, Kumar was running the full content stack: 360-degree campaigns across above-the-line advertising, social media, influencer tie-ups and performance marketing, AI-led video production, lifecycle and CRM messaging across push, email and SMS, and product storytelling stretching into UX writing and in-app launch communication. Managing both in-house creative teams and external agencies along the way gave him a operator’s view of content that few travel-industry lifers get, marketing that has to convert, not just charm.

IndiGo, for its part, is not short on scale or scrutiny. Two decades into changing how India flies, the airline has built its brand on relentless punctuality messaging and a certain no-frills cheekiness, but as budget aviation in India gets more crowded and social media turns every delay into a moment, the pressure on creative and content leadership only grows. Bringing in someone who has spent over a decade translating business priorities, whether acquisition funnels at MakeMyTrip or engagement loops at MobiKwik, into consumer-facing narrative suggests IndiGo wants its storytelling to work as hard as its route network.

For Kumar, the arc from travel journalism to travel marketing to fintech and back to travel, this time at 30,000 feet, reads less like a detour and more like a rehearsal. Few content leaders arrive at an airline having already learned how to sell both wanderlust and a wallet.