Mayank Singh promoted to associate director marketing at KFC India

GURGAON: Quick-service marketing has thrown up its latest internal elevation. Mayank Singh, who has spent the better part of a decade shaping product strategy at KFC India, has been promoted to associate director marketing, a role he takes up in August 2026 while continuing to hold the reins as head of innovation, a post he has occupied since February 2024. The move keeps Singh firmly inside Yum! Brands, the American parent that also owns Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, and rewards a run defined less by flash and more by a steady stream of menu hits.

Singh’s rise through KFC India has been almost entirely product-led. As senior brand manager, innovation, from April 2021 to January 2024, he shepherded product strategy in line with business objectives, category use occasions and consumer insight, working closely with the in-house product development team and supplier partners. His fingerprints sit on some of the chain’s more talked-about launches, the peri-peri chicken range, snackers, value lunch, chicken biryani, chicken roll, popcorn nachos in collaboration with Doritos, popcorn Maggi and the gourmet burger line, each one road-tested through qualitative and quantitative consumer research before going anywhere near a go-to-market calendar.

Before KFC, Singh spent close to seven years at Subway as senior marketing coordinator, a stretch that doubled as a masterclass in doing marketing on a shoestring across every possible channel. He built the annual marketing calendar, ran media buying and planning across traditional and digital platforms, led creative and campaign execution nationally and regionally, and handled crisis-adjacent public relations work alongside social media and local store marketing. Earlier stints at Homestead Infrastructure, McCann Erickson and Arvind Limited rounded out a career that started, fittingly enough, in agri-business development in Ahmedabad and Bangalore before pivoting fully into brand-side quick-service marketing.

At McCann Erickson, where Singh worked as project manager between 2011 and 2013, he cut his teeth on integrated campaigns for DishTV and Subway, producing more than 20 television commercials in two years, including three with Shah Rukh Khan, and playing a part in DishTV’s memorable repositioning line, “sab par dish sawaar hai.” That grounding in high-volume, high-pressure creative production appears to have stayed with him. Thirteen years on, Singh’s LinkedIn note calls himself a curious soul with a growth mindset, a description that, judging by the menu he has helped build, seems to hold up.