Brands
Sameer Wanchoo zips into VIP as chief marketing officer
MUMBAI: Earlier this month, Sameer Wanchoo packed his bags—and unpacked a bigger mandate. The seasoned marketer joined VIP Industries as chief marketing officer, taking over the brand cockpit of India’s luggage major from early December.
Wanchoo brings with him a long-haul career in consumer goods, honed across mass, premium and everything in between. Most recently, he spent over seven years at Eureka Forbes, where as CMO he helped sharpen growth engines across categories, channels and consumer cohorts.
Before that, he clocked stints at CavinKare—twice. First as VP marketing, overseeing personal care, foods and beverages, and earlier as GM marketing for hair care, where brands such as Chik, Nyle, Meera and Karthika kept their shine in a brutally competitive aisle. In between came a global toy turn at Mattel as category manager for infant and pre-school, and a retail baptism at Big Bazaar’s Food Bazaar in the west zone.
His early years read like a marketing boot camp: product management at Dabur (via Balsara Home Products), sales at ESPN Star Sports, and media planning at Starcom—before digital became dinner-table conversation.
At VIP, Wanchoo will be expected to do more than polish logos. The brief spans brand, product, digital, research, media and P&L—no small suitcase. With travel back on the boil and consumers trading up, the timing is propitious, the competition unforgiving.
From soap to suitcases, vacuums to voyages, Wanchoo has sold it all. Now he must make VIP travel faster, lighter and louder. No baggage allowed.
Brands
Preeti Misra Joins Open Media & Fortune India as Head of Events
Preeti Misra brings two decades of experience to a business that smells opportunity in live gatherings
MUMBAI: Fortune India is serious about live events and it has just hired someone who knows how to fill a room. Preeti Misra has been appointed Head of Events at Open Media & Fortune India, the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group’s media and publications arm, tasked with turning both brands into destination platforms for India’s business and intellectual elite.
Misra arrives with more than 20 years of experience in marketing communications, brand strategy and large-scale events. She has held senior roles at India Today Group, Laqshya Media Group, Times Internet and C S Direkt Events & Exhibitions, a career that spans mass-market spectacle and niche power gatherings alike. Few in the industry have logged that many miles across so many formats.
In her new role, she will run the events vertical across both Open Media and Fortune India, with a brief to build what the group describes as high-impact intellectual and experiential platforms, the kind that blur the line between editorial credibility and boardroom currency. She will report directly to Sahil Shetty, Chief Executive Officer of Open Media & Fortune India.
The appointment signals a clear strategic push. Events have become a serious revenue line for legacy media houses in India, offering advertisers something a banner ad cannot: a captive room full of decision-makers. For Fortune India, a brand that already speaks to the C-suite, the upside is obvious. Misra’s job is to make it real and make it happen quickly.
