The CMO musical chairs are spinning particularly fast in Asia this month, and interestingly, they seem to be spinning upward.

While a string of high-profile, long-tenured CMO departures globally has once again prompted questions about the future of the title, August brought a rather different story across Asia Pacific: several marketing leaders stepped into bigger, broader roles, including the top job.

In Australia, Bank of Sydney CMO Maria Karavias was promoted to the newly created role of Chief Customer Officer, expanding her remit beyond marketing to lead the bank’s customer-centric growth agenda.

In the Philippines, Melissa Henson, CMO of AIA Philippines since 2023, was named CEO of BPI AIA Life Assurance Corporation. Her new role puts her in charge of the company’s overall business strategy and operations after nearly two decades spanning marketing, customer strategy, partnerships, banking and insurance.

And in Jakarta, Dian Gemiano made the leap from CMO to CEO, joining KapanLagi Youniverse (KLY) after more than a decade in leadership roles at KG Media. For an executive whose career has increasingly blended marketing, commercial innovation and media transformation, the move from the marketing seat to the chief executive seat may be less of a leap than it first appears.

Three moves, three expanded mandates, and another reminder that while the CMO title itself may keep changing, the path from marketing into broader business leadership is very much alive in Asia.

And as some CMOs move up and out of the role, a new class is stepping in. So, who landed the top marketing job across Asia this month? Let’s meet August’s newly appointed Asian CMOs.

Around 50 million bottles of baby oil are sold in India every year. That is roughly one every two-thirds of a second.

When Mamaearth launched in 2016, plenty of very large companies already wanted those babies. Johnson & Johnson dominated the category. Unilever, P&G, Nivea, L'Oréal, Himalaya and Dabur had factories, television budgets, famous brands and distribution networks that a startup with ₹2.5 million ($26,000) could barely contemplate.

Ten years later, Mamaearth's parent company, Honasa Consumer, owns 9 brands, including The Derma Co., Aqualogica and Dr. Sheth's, and reaches roughly 300,000 physical retail outlets across India. This is what we used to call hyperscaling when I worked at Grab.

Mamaearth found young parents through search, social media, creators and e-commerce at precisely the moment those channels were changing how Indian consumers discovered products. Honasa could launch quickly, aim a product at a particular problem, watch what people searched for, see what converted and put more money behind the winners. The giants knew consumer goods inside out, but Honasa moved faster through the new routes to the consumer. Mamaearth bombed parenting channels and social feeds, built enormous online awareness and then repeated the exercise across other needs. The Derma Co went after ingredient-led skincare. Aqualogica took hydration. Dr. Sheth's brought dermatologist-led Indian skincare. BBlunt came with salon and hair credentials. Honasa had built a brand factory and dominated online.

That dominance is still evident in the numbers. Around 72% of group sales still come through online channels. Mamaearth has converted more successfully into physical retail, with roughly 45% of its revenue coming from stores. The Derma Co., Aqualogica and Dr. Sheth's together generate only around 10% of their revenue offline. They have shelf space, but not enough velocity.

Inventory hanging around in a shop is money with a QR code. Honasa has already learned how painful this can get. Project Neev, its distribution overhaul, forced the company to clean up old inventory and rebuild parts of the system that carried products into physical retail. The exercise brought write-offs and a quarterly loss.

The internet lets you kill a bad product by flipping a switch in DV360. Physical retail sends the boxes back. That problem gets harder with nine brands.

Enter Nilesh Kotalwar, promoted to Chief Marketing Officer after spending the past two years running Honasa's D2C and online revenue business. He learned classical FMCG at Hindustan Unilever and Godrej Consumer Products, working across brand management, shopper marketing, modern trade, e-commerce and business transformation. He then moved inside one of India's most successful digital challengers and ran the online revenue machine himself. He has worked inside both worlds.

His view of marketing is so understated, and I love it: "Marketing fundamentals don't change; only the channels do." Kotalwar talks about distinctive memory structures, recognition, recall, and making brands easy to choose. CEO Varun Alagh credits him with combining data-led decisions with strong brand thinking. His new remit covers integrated marketing across the entire Honasa portfolio.

The quote carries weight because Honasa has spent a decade proving the point. The first opening came through search, e-commerce, and social media. Creators widened it. Quick commerce added another route. Physical retail is now producing serious growth too. Honasa's latest quarter delivered record revenue of ₹785 crore, up 31.8%. Mamaearth returned to high-teens growth. Younger brands grew more than 40%. General Trade and Modern Trade both grew above 40%.

While all that conventional FMCG plumbing is being built, Mamaearth has also become the first Indian company to advertise on ChatGPT, working with Criteo. The campaign might do nothing but the instinct is interesting. A decade ago, Honasa went online to find consumers while the giants owned the shelves. AI-driven search and answer engines may become another major route into product discovery. Honasa is already poking around there.

Kotalwar has to decide where The Derma Co ends and Dr. Sheth's begins, which experiments deserve national distribution and which products should vanish before they become expensive furniture in 300,000 shops. He also has to preserve the dexterity that got Honasa to where it is. The company spent 10 years arriving early. Kotalwar needs the giants' muscle but not their inertia.

Donald Trump is angry that Canadians have stopped buying American booze.

After Trump imposed tariffs on Canada, provincial liquor boards pulled American alcohol from their shelves. Ontario stopped buying it entirely. U.S. alcohol exports to Canada subsequently collapsed by 81%, from $718 million to $137 million. Jack Daniel's owner Brown-Forman says American spirits remain largely absent from Canadian shelves.

Consequences can really spoil a good bourbon.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, whisky has a rather different problem.

India wants better stuff.

Whisky already dominates the country's spirits market, but regular products are losing volume while premium whisky grows. Younger, wealthier consumers are trading up, Indian single malts have started embarrassing respectable Scottish ones at international competitions, and the UK-India trade deal will make imported Scotch considerably cheaper.

Into this unusually lively bar walks Jagatjit Industries, one of the great survivors of Indian booze.

The company was founded in 1944 under the patronage of Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala. It launched Aristocrat whisky in 1968, became one of India's significant domestic distillers, then spent decades watching newer rivals and eventually multinationals take control of the party. Aristocrat survived. But the brand that once led parts of the Indian whisky market now sells fewer than a million cases a year.

The company is not in good shape. In the quarter ending March 2026, it reported a consolidated net loss of ₹16.69 crore, widening the loss of the previous year. Sales for that quarter plummeted by nearly 31%. The company has also been wobbly upstairs - appointing a new CEO, Roopak Chaturvedi, in April 2026, and seeing its Chief Financial Officer resign in August 2026. This is a company searching for a new direction.

Into this breach steps Eiti Singhal. Jagatjit is a legacy player in a market that has moved on. To survive, it needs to modernize its brand portfolio and re-engage with consumers. Singhal’s nearly 19 years of experience across FMCG, consumer durables, e-commerce, and retail is precisely the kind of cross-pollination the company needs. She is a modern marketing professional who has worked at Vega Industries, Samsung India, Panasonic India, Snapdeal, and Aditya Birla Retail. At Vega, she was credited with helping transform the company into a head-to-toe personal care brand.

Premium whisky is growing while regular products shrink. Indian single malts are winning awards and attention. The UK-India trade deal will make imported Scotch cheaper and more tempting to the consumers Jagatjit needs to win. Aristocrat, the company’s flagship, is stuck in the middle: too ordinary to command premium pricing, too old to feel new.

Singhal must make a series of uncomfortable choices. Should Jagatjit chase premium with new expressions at greater cost, or defend value? Which brands deserve national distribution, and which should be retired? How do you make a whisky launched in 1968 feel relevant to drinkers who increasingly equate “good whisky” with Indian single malt or affordable Scotch?

Her mandate, “brand growth and development” and “sustainable business growth”, is corporate shorthand for fixing the brand story, cleaning up the portfolio and finding new routes to the consumer before the bar moves on entirely. Packaging, price ladders, distribution and digital storytelling are all in play.

Ultimately, she has to decide what Aristocrat is for. Premium contender, value workhorse, or a famous old bottle whose best years are behind it.

Jagatjit has spent decades losing ground through stale brands, family turmoil and stronger competitors.

Trump managed to wreck American booze in Canada in a matter of months.

Singhal has plenty to fix. At least she doesn’t have Donald.  

For non-Indian readers, Zee needs a little explaining.

India’s television market is completely bonkers.

The country has 919 private satellite TV channels. Television still reaches well over 700 million people every week. And “Indian television” is really a pile of different television markets sitting on top of each other: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam and more, each with its own stars, dramas, movies, advertisers and viewing habits.

Zee helped create this monster.

In 1990, founder Subhash Chandra was watching satellite coverage of the Gulf War when he became fascinated by what the technology could do. Two years later, Zee TV began uplinking from Hong Kong and became India’s first private satellite television channel. Until then, Indian television had largely belonged to state broadcaster Doordarshan.

It started with a single channel. Today Zee operates more than 80 of them across more than 10 languages, alongside streaming service ZEE5, movies and music. Its content reaches a claimed 1.3 billion people across 190 countries.

34 years after helping blow open Indian television, Zee has another problem - the money is leaking. In its latest quarter, advertising revenue fell 11.5% to ₹671 crore. Subscription revenue rose 15.8% to ₹1,137 crore. Total income grew 4.8%.

Profit fell 46.9%. That’s not a typo.

Expenses rose nearly 13%, including a 62% jump in advertising and publicity costs as Zee poured money into content, digital growth and its return to sports.

Advertising has been soft for years. Zee’s ad revenue had already fallen 11% in FY25. Viewers meanwhile have television, streaming, YouTube, connected TVs, short-form video and an expanding pile of other ways to avoid whatever a programmer decided should air at 9pm. Following them is expensive.

Zee is spending lots more to earn only a little bit more. Revenue grew 4.8%, expenses climbed almost 13%, and profit nearly halved. Television still pays a lot of the bills.

Streaming keeps presenting new ones. Zee now talks about OTT feeds, connected TV, FAST channels, device partnerships and new pricing models. Somewhere along the way it also shortened the corporate brand to “Z”, presumably because two extra letters were slowing the transformation down. 

Into this situation comes Ashish Mishra.

Mishra spent the past 6 years as CMO of ACKO, India’s digital insurance company. 4 months after joining in 2020, he told colleagues that ACKO felt like “India’s best kept secret.” By the time he left, he reckoned it had become one of the country’s most recognizable brands.

Insurance is dull as dishwater. Mishra and his team gave ACKO a distinctive consumer identity and then spent 6 years seeing how far they could push it. Campaigns included a 90-second musical tribute to Mumbai [video below, it gave me goosebumps].

Mishra’s description of the approach is considerably better than most marketing manifestos:

“Normal is boring.”

Mishra says ACKO grew 20X during his time there and describes marketing as a “revenue engine, not a cost centre.” So Mishra has spent a lot of his career making marketing produce a customer action.

Zee could use some of this.

At ACKO, he had a young digital-native brand and considerable freedom to make it famous. Zee gives him 80-plus channels, 10 languages, decades of brand history, a streaming platform hungry for investment and a quarterly profit number heading rapidly in the wrong direction.

His CEO, Punit Goenka, talks about sharpening marketing and strengthening the proposition of “Z”. Mishra talks about brand and content strategy, consumer engagement and business value. Polite words for a pretty brutal job.

Mishra made an insurance company difficult to ignore. Zee already has everybody’s attention somewhere.

His job is giving them a reason to choose Zee again tomorrow, while the company works out what Zee is.