Self-employed

Do get in touch with me (kart75@gmail.com) for these engagements.

1. Communications consulting:
As a communications consultant, I work with organizations to help plan their communications strategy in,
- identifying & building communication narratives
- digital/social media communication strategy
- marketing campaign strategy
- content marketing strategy
- crisis communications strategy
Clients include Google, Myntra, SunTec, The/Nudge Institute, Crio, Juniper, Himalaya, RedSeer, and Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives, among others.

2. Corporate workshops:
Communications team workshops: Meant for corporate PR teams, marketing teams, or internal communications teams to help expand their perspective, seek inspiration from relevant (category/industry-specific) campaigns and communications case studies, and start hands-on work on some of the immediate and pressing challenges at work. Clients include Cipla, Medtronic, Maersk, PWC, Omidyar Network India, Ashoka India, and Cleartrip, among others.

3. Personal branding for leaders:
Personal branding workshops for leaders in organizations where I help them understand the need for personal branding (as a subset of organizational branding), identify personal brand narratives, and hands-on efforts in managing their personal brands, using social media, with a clear plan and goal. Clients include Kotak Group, Carrier India, EXIM Bank, Citrix, Akamai, Omidyar Network India, Fullerton India, EY, MetrixLab, among others.

4. Personal branding for employees:
Employee advocacy workshops, to help an organization’s employees become its brand ambassadors. Key clients include Maruti Suzuki India Limited (trained 800+ employees across 200 departments), Radio Mirchi (training 100+ Radio Jockeys and 25+ Programming Heads), among others.

Communications Consultant

The Advertiser's Guide to the Galaxy

Subscribe to my weekly podcast on advertising: https://bit.ly/tagttghome

Podcaster

Ogilvy & Mather

National Lead, Social@Ogilvy

Flipkart.com

AVP - Corporate Communications

Edelman

Head of Digital Strategy

Text 100

Account Director

Pramod Shankar Associates

Chief Consultant

Subex Ltd

Manager - Corporate Communications

Birlasoft (India) Limited

Executive - Marketing Communications

Steria India Ltd (formerly IIS Infotech/Xansa India)

Assistant Executive - Corporate Communications

Summary: 

Communications professional with 2 decades’ experience in creating, building and managing perceptions of brands across agency and client environments.

Experience spanning corporate communications, public relations, marketing communications, investor relations, digital/social media marketing and employee communication for B2B (technology) and B2C brands.

Winner of gold at Socialathon India 2015, gold at Emvie 2015 (Best media innovation - social media) and bronze at DMA Asia Echo Award 2015 (Interactive - Creative use of data).

Guest lecturer at Tata Management Training Centre's Leadership Development Program for IAS Officers and Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru – Advanced Digital Marketing and Digital Marketing for CMOs

Award-winning blogger, across 2 areas of interest - professional blog, since 2008 (communications/marketing - http://www.beastoftraal.com) and music blog, since 2005 (http://www.milliblog.com). 

Frequent columnist in leading publications, on the intersection of corporate communications, social media and advertising/marketing. Samples:
- How to build a socially relevant brand | ET BrandEquity http://bit.ly/2NuutnP 
- From 'Log kya kahenge?' to 'Log kya keh rahe hain' | ET BrandEquity 
- http://bit.ly/2u0jydn 
- Amazon-Swara Bhaskar Issue: An Analysis | afaqs! http://bit.ly/2qTF9ll 
- How to avoid social media self-destruction | The Economic Times http://bit.ly/2MuxvrD

Frequent speaker and panelist in leading events to talk on and discuss perspectives on communications, branding and social media.


Karthik Srinivasan

Oh my God! This is phenomenally effective communication! Fantastic narrative device with the right amount of exaggeration that lands the message with a bang, while also sending chills down the spine of the target audience (parents of young children)! Excellent work by the Irish agency Core Creative.

#advertising #creativity

Communications strategy consultant. Connect with me for corporate workshops on personal branding. Ex-Ogilvy, ex-Flipkart, ex-Edelman. No paid posts - my words are not for sale.

Read the room, IndiGo! If the ad is going to evoke, 'No, you aren't' or 'Yeah, right!', along with, 'You had 18 months to prepare for the implementation of the FTDL norms', then the ad is completely pointless.

Instead, anticipate the reaction (aka 'read the room') and say something that at least starts to seem like you care. Here are some rough examples.

1. We didn’t meet the standards you expect, or the ones we claim. 
We can’t change the last few days, but we're working hard to fix the next ones.
We are sorry.

2. This is NOT the IndiGo experience you deserve.
We are doing our best to set things right.
We are sorry.

3. We let you down. 
We’re working urgently to fix the disruption.
We are sorry.

#advertising #indigo

What a fantastic idea for a collab! As someone who grew up in Coimbatore, I love the fact that another Coimbatore-based brand (Vilvah) thought of using the Annapoorna's legendary filter coffee, and in particular, Annapoorna's Rose Milk (I may have gulped down many, many liters of this divine drink through my school life in Coimbatore) as an inspiration for a co-branded range of products, starting with lip balm. 

Another Coimbatore icon, Krishna Sweets, is also known for its famous Mysurpa. How about a Mysurpa inspired lip balm, next?

In fact, this is an excellent template for famous eating joints (and their famous items) to consider a similar collab with local beauty/skin care brands of those respective cities. For instance, Madurai could do one for their famous Jigarthanda. 

What could be potential items for Bengaluru, I wonder!

#product #innovation #regional #branding

This is one of the most interesting positioning ideas I have seen in the wealth management category! Ionic Wealth's (Angel One’s wealth management brand) new ad campaign by the agency Manja pitches wealth as a start-up and wealth managers as co-founders! 

Most people today admire the entrepreneurial mindset, even if they’ve never started a company. So the positioning taps into that cultural aspiration and hence is attention-grabbing. It suggests that building wealth is an active, intentional, high-agency project, and not a passive 'buy a mutual fund and forget it' activity.

However, for someone who has actually founded or worked inside a startup, the analogy may seem to wobble. A startup isn’t just an idea you nurture - it’s months (or years) of ambiguity, risk, existential crises, broken sleep patterns, fundraising cycles, pivots, down rounds, team management, board management, self-doubt, and occasionally, spectacular failures. Your personal wealth, hopefully, is not that. So the metaphor works emotionally, but not literally (which it need not, of course).

The co-founder claim too is on similar lines. It is absolutely bold and eye-catchy because most wealth managers frame themselves as partners, guides, strategists, experts, planners, custodians or some variation of those themes. The 'co-founder' word signals themes of alignment, collaboration, co-ownership of the mission, a shared growth mindset, and an implication of skin in the game, all quite different from what wealth managers do.

A real co-founder takes existential/personal risk, puts in sweat equity, is operationally involved, shares ownership, sinks or swims with you, is accountable on a daily basis. A wealth manager does/need not do those things, nor should they. They advise, monitor, optimise, rebalance, recommend, coach. So the narrative works at a brand-philosophy level ('we’re equally *invested* in your success'), but it can unintentionally trivialise what real co-founders actually do.

But this campaign isn’t really speaking to real founders who don't wake up and say 'I’m building a startup so I can get personally rich' and for whom wealth is often a side effect, not the main objective. Instead, I believe the campaign targets first-generation wealth creators, startup employees with ESOP liquidity, young professionals with high income, aspirational millennials entering the wealth-building phase, people who identify with hustle culture, ambition, and 'build mode'. For them, this message grabs attention beautifully.

So, excellent idea and execution, Manja!

#advertising #marketing #positioning #creativity

Google DeepMind

UX Content Designer

Google

Content Designer, Gemini (prev. Bard)

Sanas

🚀 Developed and led the brand strategy, positioning, and go-to-market
🚀 Led and executed account-based marketing strategies
🚀 Provided planning and leadership in marketing by ensuring that the appropriate structures, systems, competencies, and values are developed
🚀 Collaboratively built demand models and determine the number of MQLs and SQLs that need to be delivered by marketing
🚀 Managed and delivered the marketing automation stack to help support marketing, sales and customer acquisition efforts.
🚀 Tracked, measured, analyzed and reported on the effectiveness of demand generation campaigns and their impact on the pipeline, making recommendations for future programs.
🚀 Planned, managed and executed social media and event marketing campaigns as part of GTM strategy in Europe and US
🚀 Closely worked with a network of designers and developers to execute all the above projects

Brand Marketing Lead

GrowthX

At GrowthX, I learned a structured approach to product growth/growth marketing. I am able to lead growth teams, research, learn, and apply crucial concepts + experiments across the funnel, starting from acquisition, onboarding, engagement & retention to monetisation.

Growth X Fellow

Observe.AI

Senior Content Marketing Manager

4th marketing hire at Observe.AI. 

Observe.AI is an AI based SaaS platform. As part of their global marketing team, I was responsible for strategy, execution and stakeholder management. I constantly worked with teammates across different timezones, global agencies, stakeholders and led their content & growth strategy.

Was part of social growth, SEO content growth, thought leadership.
- 500K+ organic views on LinkedIn via co-ordinated campaigns 
- Biggest logo via organic ($3M+)
- Fastest enterprise logo converted in 8 hours ($200K+)
- Over 700+ leads generated with On-demand campaigns
- 500+ enterprise webinar attendees

Content Marketing Manager

Vokal India (pivot to Koo)

35th employee at Vokal (pivoted to Koo app).

Vokal is a "Building for Bharat" initiative.— India's first audio-video based QnA platform in over 11 languages.

- Hit 1 million+ organic views on Youtube in $0 
- Converted Influencers with 500K+ followers in $0.00 
- Identified and onboarded influencers from Civil Servants, Top Dermatologists, News Anchors, Actors, to Politicians via offline and online channels.
- Scaled a community from 0- 2500+ users for an end-to-end Live feature
- Handled communications sent to the community- creation, distribution, user engagement (in-app & offline) in 11 languages
- Ran campaigns to activate/re-activate community members
- Launched new platform features with enough precedence set for incoming users

Growth Marketing Manager

Bizongo

31st employee at Bizongo

Key areas of responsibilities:

- Content strategy to drive end-to-end marketing funnel
- Manage social media and scale followers from 0 to 5203 (organically)
- Coordinate with external agencies to successfully deliver content at scale
- Lead editorial activities for official company communication
- Hire and manage freelancers to generate good quality content
- Cross-functional content collaboration to drive North Star metric of the company
- Find new acquisition channels to drive pipeline

Senior Content Marketer

Key Areas of Responsibilities include:

- Managing and editing official blog of the organisation: https://blog.bizongo.in
- Branding and marketing using content via Social Media
- Responsible for writing all official communication across user platforms
- Analysing and understanding user behaviour for B2B e-commerce sector in India
- Building website content simplifying user experience for Tier II and Tier III cities' audiences
- Building a packaging community via Digital Marketing
- Hiring and managing freelance content writers for SEO
- Strategizing content and managing content writers for timely delivery of content
- Researching and implementing trends on Social Media to receive a competitive advantage
- Working closely with the Graphic designer, UI/UX Designer and Illustrator to create engaging outputs used for marketing.
- Building video content and visualising story lines around product promotions
- Writing PR articles and overlooking their distribution

Content Marketer

Key Areas of Responsibilities include:

- Writing for the official blog of the organisation
- Branding and marketing using content via Social Media
- Responsible for writing all official communication across user platforms
- Analysing and understanding user behavior for B2B e-commerce sector in India

Content Writer

Stealth Startup

Worked at Acadmentor as Content Manager     
     •	Built a detailed database for standard IXth and Xth, using Latex for Digital Typesetting
     •	Responsible for curating questions- mathematically and grammatically
     •	Training and managing remote interns (across India) in order to meet the deadlines for the launch of the application (website)
     •	Responsible for the user interface testing of the website application
     •	Reviewing applications and hiring interns for the summer

Content Manager

Reliance

Produced a review Project on ‘Dehydration Efficiency and Desalting Efficiency of Desalters’ and ‘Over-view of Crude Refining Unit’ at Reliance Industries Limited. Plant visit to the various factions of a refining unit and understanding the processes involved. 
Part of the induction safety drill and understanding the Precautionary Requirements in a chemical plant.

Chemical Engineering Intern

Scaling B2B SaaS GTM from 0 ➡️ 100

"The apple fell on his head, and Newton discovered gravity."

In his lifetime, Newton made beautiful breakthroughs in Physics but it was Gravity that kept his popularity intact for centuries. Fast forward to today, everyone knows the 'Apple Tale of Gravity'.

And that's the power of storytelling— simple, relatable and as human, as can be.

I sincerely believe that stories can impact lives. From Darwin's evolution to Stephen Hawking's Big Bang, these theories are popular for one, and only one reason— the mysteries of the Universe are explained like a bedtime story.

At the core of my GTM strategy is a memorable story. For customers to relate to, for sales to sell it.

Let's start with a breakdown of my decade of work experience across a variety of industries.
- B2B for 10+ years
- SaaS for 9 years
- AI for 3 years

- I started my career as a Content Writer with Bizongo, and quickly rose to Senior Content Marketer. 
- Post that, I joined Vokal as a Community Manager—another startup in the vernacular content space.
- After Vokal, I was a Sr. Content Marketer Manager at Observe.AI building their GTM strategy via product marketing and content.

My 0 ➡️ 10 journey 
- First marketer at SaaS and AI companies like Bizongo, Sanas, Vokal

- Set up and built the entire communication foundation for startups at Seed to Series C stages: Content, Martech, Brand & Positioning, Demand Generation, Social Media

- Built formidable distribution and demand across different traction channels: Blog, SEO, Video, Social Media, Case Studies, Reports, Website content, Email Marketing, Thought Leadership, PR, and Employee Branding.

You name it, I've worked on it!

From strategizing the annual blog calendars, designing, hiring, and coordinating a team of remote content writers to building an online brand, I was a mentor, a tough editor, a community builder, a scriptwriter, and an author.

I market the future of technology— AI and easy to work with truly global and diverse teams.

taplio

The Battle

Karthik Srinivasan

Vartika Gupta 💫

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The Battle

Karthik Srinivasan

Vartika Gupta 💫

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Karthik Srinivasan's LinkedIn Performance

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