Snapdeal ropes in former Airtel CMO as strategy head

E-commerce marketplace Snapdeal, which is run by Jasper Infotech Pvt Ltd, has appointed Bharti Airtel's former chief marketing officer Govind Rajan as its new chief strategy officer.

This is the latest in a series of top level appointments by Snapdeal in the past 12 months and the third from Bharti Airtel.

As CMO for Bharti Airtel's B2C practice, Rajan was responsible for revenue and market share growth, customer life cycle management and for building marketing capability across the organisation, as per a Snapdeal press statement.

Concurrently, he also served as CEO of Airtel Money, which is the telecom operators' mobile money and payments venture.

Prior to Bharti Airtel, Rajan had a 15-year association with Hindustan Unilever (HUL). He served as regional vice president (South Asia) for skin cleansing and vice president for the skin care business at the FMCG major.

Rajan has a master degree in international business from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Madras.

Snapdeal and Flipkart have been strengthening their top deck as they brace for hyper competition in the Indian e-commerce space.

Last month, Snapdeal roped in former Bharti Airtel senior executive Anand Chandrasekaran as its chief product officer. Prior to that, the company brought in Jayant Sood as chief customer experience officer from the telco. Sood was last working as head-contact experience at Bharti Airtel.

Earlier this month, Snapdeal hired former Procter & Gamble (P&G) executive Amit Choudhary as its senior vice president – corporate finance. It also appointed Gaurav Gupta as VP of engineering. Prior to that, the company brought in Jeyandran Venugopal from Yahoo as technology advisor and Bhuvan Gupta as VP of engineering. In February, Snapdeal CTO Amitabh Misra had quit the company.

Snapdeal also roped in Vivek Patankar as senior vice president – finance from Unilever to replace its former CTO Aakash Moondhra, who quit the company in February.

Last month, Flipkart appointed Sudhir Sitapati, a vice president with consumer goods giant Unilever, as an advisory board member for its commerce platform. Prior to that, it appointed IT industry veteran Ravi Garikipati in a newly created position – entrepreneur in residence. In March, Flipkart hired Punit Soni, a Google product management executive and former vice president of product management at Motorola, as chief product officer.