MAM
Virtusa’s Asia head of marketing appointed to World Brand Congress Advisory Council
BENGALURU: Global business consulting and IT outsourcing company Virtusa Corporation today announced the appointment of its Asia head marketing Muralidharan Erumpala to the Advisory Council for the 2013 World Brand Congress Summit, being held this October in Mumbai, India.
At Virtusa, Erumpala is responsible for elevating and accelerating Virtusa’s global brand presence to support targeted business outcomes. He is also responsible for content marketing, social media marketing, global PR and corporate communications functions.
The World Brand Congress Summit will focus on developing and nurturing ‘Sustainable Brands’ in today’s increasingly competitive and rapidly evolving markets.
The World Brand Congress is touted as the single largest gathering of the best brains behind some of the world’s most successful and sought after brands. It claims to be a meeting place for the world‘s branding and marketing elite under one roof.
Erumpala said, “The World Brand Congress is an exclusive forum for the top executives from the world‘s biggest brands and most influential marketing organisations to meet and discuss critical business challenges. I am looking forward to contributing to the discussion.”
In the last 30 years, Virtusa says that Erumpala has personally spearheaded and managed several successful brand management initiatives at leading IT organisations. He comes with vast experience in advertising, branding, marketing and customer experience initiatives across strategic and execution-driven roles.
MAM
Smytten appoints Shishir Varma as CEO of Pulseai Research
Rebranded AI platform scales with 150 plus clients and 30 million users.
MUMBAI: In a world obsessed with what consumers say, Smytten is betting on what they actually do. The company has appointed Shishir Varma as chief executive officer of Pulseai Research, signalling a sharper push into AI-led, behaviour-driven consumer insights. The move comes as Smytten rebrands its insights vertical from Smytten PulseAI to Pulseai Research, marking a shift away from traditional, project-based research towards a more continuous, intelligence-led model.
Varma brings over 30 years of global experience across APAC markets, including India, China and Japan. Most recently managing director, Insights at Kantar Japan, he has built and scaled consumer insight businesses across geographies, including playing a key role in establishing Millward Brown in India. His mandate now: turn Pulseai into a category-defining platform in a space still dominated by surveys and static reports.
The pitch is straightforward but ambitious. Instead of relying on claimed responses, Pulseai Research taps into observed behaviour leveraging Smytten’s ecosystem of 30 million users built over a decade of product discovery, trials and purchases. The idea is to close the long-standing gap between what consumers claim and how they actually behave.
The numbers suggest early traction. In under 18 months, the platform has onboarded over 150 enterprise clients across sectors, pointing to growing demand for faster, more reliable alternatives to legacy research models.
Under the hood, the platform blends behavioural data with AI and large language model-led analysis to deliver real-time sentiment tracking, scalable qualitative insights, faster quantitative studies and always-on brand intelligence. In practical terms, that means compressing research timelines from weeks to days without sacrificing depth.
The ambition extends beyond FMCG. Pulseai Research is positioning itself as a cross-category intelligence layer, spanning auto, education, gadgets and emerging consumer segments anywhere behaviour-rich data can sharpen decision-making.
For Smytten, the leadership hire is less about optics and more about direction. With Varma at the helm, the company is leaning into a simple but powerful premise: in the age of AI, insight isn’t just about asking better questions, it’s about watching more closely.
