July was another busy month for global CMO appointments. We tracked more than 40 new hires worldwide, including 5 in India and one each in Sri Lanka and Australia.

In this edition of CMO Moves Asia, we examine:

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Roli Shrivastava joined Hocco when her daughter was 8 months old. Her daughter is now 8 years old. She built the marketing function from infancy to a Rs 530 crore run rate.

The founding story is quite unusual. The Chona family are India’s Ice Cream Royal Family who built Havmor, sold it to Lotte in 2017 for Rs 1,020 crore ($122 million USD), and sat out a five-year non-compete. They returned to ice cream in October 2023 with Hocco, carrying money, supplier relationships, and category instincts.

The company launched with a Rs 100 crore ($12 million USD) manufacturing plant and its own refrigerated fleet. Around 70% of the initial investment went into distribution infrastructure. Ice cream is a distribution business disguised as a branding business.

Hocco grew fast. FY25 revenue: Rs 220 crore ($26.4 million USD). FY26: Rs 530 crore ($63.6 million USD) - 130% year-on-year growth. The company is targeting Rs 1,000 crore ($120 million USD) in FY27. Chona told investors they'd hit Rs 500 crore in 5 to 7 years. They did it in two.

Shrivastava runs this marketing operation within a 10% budget constraint. "Scarcity drives innovation," she says. She built a portfolio split: 70-80% hygiene products - classic flavors, competitive pricing - and 20% differentiation products like Aamchi, Bix, and O-Cone. The bridge between a DTC brand and a real business is managing both at once.

She works across a messy portfolio: Hocco Ice Creams, Hocco Restaurants, Hocco Eateries, Hocco Foods, Huber & Holly, and now Huber Cakes. She's expanding Cones & Candies into impulse and quick-commerce channels while overseeing the sixth US kitchen opening in Cumming, Georgia. One brain, five businesses, two countries.

Most "digital-first" CMOs treat outdoor advertising as an afterthought. Shrivastava builds an award-winning OOH practice while running quick commerce. She runs Cab Carnival in Mumbai - wrapped cabs with QR ordering. She launched a 3D Leemo billboard in Ahmedabad and a Maha Shivratri Tripundra OOH campaign on the route to Mahakaleshwar. She won e4m Neons OOH Advertiser of the Year with 8 metals.

She also closes stores as carefully as she opens them. The Panchvati farewell turned a 50-year-old eatery closure into a 10-day queue-forming nostalgia event. Most CMOs only know how to launch things. She managed an ending with emotional weight and turned it into brand equity. The ability to close well is rarer than the ability to launch. That's a skill she'll need as novelty product cycles die and markets don't work out.

She owns the full product cycle. Her posts on Bun Maska Bix detail the R&D, packaging design, film production, and channel rollout. The O-Cone has a protective blister pack because quick commerce requires packaging that travels well. She doesn't just brief agencies. She sits in the kitchen. Product and marketing are the same job to her.

At Rs 1,000 crore, the question is whether she can make the ordinary products as memorable as the stunts. She's trying to root innovation in everyday culture rather than shock value. She spent 8 years proving she can build a brand India talks about. Now she has to prove she can build a business India buys from habitually. The marketing got Hocco this far. The operations she keeps talking about - freezer productivity, pushcart branding, protective blister packs - will take it the rest of the way.

And honestly, you have to check out the Hocco website. It’s next level cute with a chocolate browser mouse pointer, and you won’t resist the jump button to make the animated green guy leap.

Bajaj Electricals has hired Tiny Sengupta to answer a hard question: how far can an 87-year-old household name still stretch?

The company began by importing electrical goods, then shifted into domestic manufacturing when the Second World War broke global supply. That history helped make Bajaj one of India’s most familiar names across lighting, fans and household appliances.

Then came the advertising. In the 1960s, Bajaj Electricals created the “Jab main chhota baccha tha” jingle for its lighting business. The title means “When I was a little child.” Chairman Shekhar Bajaj reportedly rejected it at first, then changed his mind. He was right to. The campaign became a hit, with viewers supposedly waiting for it on India’s only TV channel. (As of March 2025, India now has 918 permitted private satellite TV channels!)

Bajaj understood something basic but powerful: music, nostalgia and repetition can make a functional product feel beloved.

Sengupta inherits that legacy. She also inherits a portfolio that is harder to explain.

Bajaj Electricals now presents four consumer brands: Bajaj, Morphy Richards, Nex and Nirlep. Yet the appointment announcement named only Bajaj and Morphy Richards. That looks deliberate. Nex and Nirlep were meant to help the company step beyond the dependable, mass-market pull of Bajaj. Instead, they have become expensive distractions. In FY26, Bajaj Electricals wrote down Nirlep goodwill and took further impairment charges linked mainly to Nex and Nirlep. The consumer business is under strain too: revenue fell, the division slipped into loss, and lighting held up better than the rest.

So, Sengupta arrives with two problems: brand architecture and business discipline.

Bajaj is the trusted, affordable name. Morphy Richards is the more stylish, more premium option (I remember them from my Mum’s 1980s Nottinghamshire Kitchen!). Nex also reaches for premium buyers, while Nirlep covers cookware. That can create confusion fast. Too many brands are chasing the same household, often with products that do not look different enough to justify the split.

Sengupta now has to make the choices more stark: which brand sells what, who each one is for, and why any of them deserve a higher price tag. Morphy Richards may matter most. Bajaj Electricals sold the brand under license for more than two decades before buying the rights across India and several neighboring markets.

Sengupta joins from Johnson & Johnson Vision Care, where she led the Indian business across commercial performance, brand building and market expansion. She also sounds refreshingly blunt. “I am not married by choice,” she has said. Her advice to younger professionals is just as direct: “Dream big, be fearless in your choices, have clarity about your decisions, and own them.”

That may be the kind of marketer Bajaj needs now: someone willing to choose.

#wedidthemath.

KFC probably sells around 300 million pieces of chicken across South Asia every year. At roughly 235 calories per standard piece, our estimated 300 million pieces contain around 70.5 billion calories. Enough to keep one person on a 2,000-calorie diet for more than 96,000 years.

The CMO problem here is not math.

This market is a red ocean soaked in fryer oil. KFC competes with McDonald’s and Burger King, aggressive international operators with their own property, delivery and value machinery. Then there is an agile group of local chains that can move faster, season harder and charge less.

Competitor Wow! Momo now has more than 850 restaurants across India, including its Wow! Chicken format. It opened 200 stores in FY26 and plans another 150 to 200 this year. Burger Singh has passed 200 outlets across more than 100 cities and raised ₹82 crore in March to build a faster franchise machine. In Pakistan, Kababjees Fried Chicken has spread from Karachi into Lahore and beyond.

These businesses do not need to explain fried chicken. They can replicate the format, localize the spice, undercut the price and open closer to home. Rishab Mukherjee’s problem is the initials on the bucket.

Mukherjee joins KFC after more than 16 years at Procter & Gamble. Most recently, he ran the beauty business and overall brand function across Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. Earlier, he led haircare marketing in Japan and Korea and worked across SK-II in Asia Pacific. So he has seen both ends of the price ladder.

SK-II persuades customers to spend serious money on a beauty ritual. KFC needs mass reach while retaining enough desire to avoid them being viewed as generic fried chicken.

The Indian business is growing again after several difficult quarters. Same-store sales at KFC restaurants operated by Devyani International rose 4.9% in the March quarter, the strongest performance in 14 quarters. They grew another 3.3% between April and June.

Why? KFC introduced ₹99 meals, sharpened its in-store pricing and pulled away from indiscriminate online discounting. The traffic returned.

A ₹99 meal can fill restaurants and bellies quickly. It also trains people to wait for the next offer. That is especially dangerous when Burger Singh, Wow! Chicken and hundreds of local operators create their own cheap bundles.

The local challengers are fast becoming properly funded businesses.

Wow! Momo added a new store roughly every 36 hours during FY26 and is targeting revenue of ₹1,200 crore by 2027. Burger Singh’s latest investment will fund store design, training, tech, supply chain and franchise support: these boring operational capabilities that allow a local restaurant idea to hyperscale.

Kababjees represents a different threat. It has grown from a recognized Pakistani restaurant name into a broader food group spanning fried chicken, pizza, bakeries, express formats and full-service dining. Its chicken chain can borrow local familiarity and flavor preferences that KFC is sluggish to research, test and persuade franchisees to adopt.

KFC has supply-chain power, enormous awareness and a product recognized before customers see the menu. But scale can make a company slower in a market changing this quickly.

Local competitors can introduce a flavour because it is suddenly popular on TikTok. KFC has to consider product consistency, kitchen equipment, franchisee economics, food safety and whether the idea travels across several countries.

Then there’s the background noise. KFC’s two major Indian franchisees, Devyani International and Sapphire Foods, are progressing with a merger that will create one of the country’s largest restaurant operators. The combination is designed partly to generate more than ₹2 billion in annual savings. One larger partner might make national execution easier but It will also give that partner more power.

Franchisees control much of what customers experience: the price, the queue, delivery time, restaurant cleanliness and whether the chicken arriving at the table looks anything like the chicken in the advertisement.

Every marketing idea eventually becomes a conversation about restaurant margins and who is paying.

P&G has prepared Mukherjee for that argument. His final role combined brand leadership with commercial and P&L responsibility. He has managed portfolios across countries, price points and retailers without assuming every consumer wants the same product presented in the same way.

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Maldives are not one convenient chicken market. Income, religion, flavour, eating occasions and delivery economics change between countries, cities and sometimes neighbouring streets.

Too much localization? It creates a sprawling menu, difficult kitchens and a global brand nobody recognizes. Mukherjee must protect the Colonel while giving local teams enough room to fight.

KFC is also refreshing itself globally through new restaurant designs, more boneless products, heavier use of sauces and updated branding. The company says it wants to define “modern chicken” for a new generation. India has already become an important testing ground for products. These new sauces are fun but KFC must remain craveable while competing on value. It must localize faster.

300 million pieces is an impressive starting point. The next piece could just as easily come in a Wow! Chicken box, a Burger Singh bag or a Kababjees bucket.

Mukherjee has been hired to keep it with the Colonel.