MAM
Unilever veteran Pawan Kumar Marella joins Max Healthcare as chief experience and brand officer
After 23 years building brands at Unilever, the P&L veteran becomes chief experience and brand officer, and starts by hitting the biology textbooks
MUMBAI: Twenty-three years at Unilever will teach anyone how to sell soap, tea and ketchup across three continents. It does not, by Pawan Kumar Marella’s own cheerful admission, teach anyone medicine. That has not stopped Max Healthcare from hiring him as chief experience and brand officer, handing reputation and patient experience to a man who spent his career in fast-moving consumer goods rather than hospital wards, and betting that the instincts which built global brands will translate to building trust in healthcare.
The CV that got him the job is formidable. Marella grew Unilever’s East Africa beauty and personal care business from $50m to over $100m across Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, delivering annual growth of 14 to 22 per cent. Before that, he co-founded Unilever’s Ethiopia operation from nothing, no infrastructure, no data, no precedent, and drove it to over 200 per cent CAGR in three years, with Lifebuoy alone growing 138 per cent year on year. In India, he restored market leadership on the Rs 1,000 crore Brooke Bond Red Label and 3 Roses tea portfolio, and later redesigned Unilever’s global digital and commercial model as strategy director, a redesign that delivered €45m in organisational savings.
Most recently he ran global marketing capabilities for 5,000 marketers across Unilever’s top 30 brands, representing 80 per cent of company turnover, and co-designed BrandVerse, a brand identity framework rolled out globally within 12 months. He also managed to write a book along the way, “Dear Rookie, Don’t Panic”, and co-chaired the World Federation of Advertisers’ Capability Forum.
At Max Healthcare, chaired by Abhay Soi, Marella now takes on brand and patient experience in a sector where trust is earned in exam rooms, not boardrooms. His own message is refreshingly honest: he is starting by listening, learning and re-reading school biology and chemistry. For an industry increasingly convinced that healthcare needs the discipline of consumer marketing as much as clinical excellence, that combination of humility and heavyweight commercial pedigree looks a promising start.
