- Share
- Tweet
MUMBAI: Faraz Sayed has swapped the automotive fast lane for the grocery aisle. A month into his new job as digital & marketing services lead, foods, at Unilever, the media veteran is settling into a role that sits at the crossroads of marketing strategy, consumer insights, brand building and business growth. It is, by his own admission, both exciting and humbling, and it caps a career that has quietly climbed the ranks of India’s media and marketing establishment for over a decade.
The move from Tata Motors, where Sayed spent close to two years as senior media manager, is telling. Automotive marketing in India has grown fierce, with legacy players and electric vehicle challengers slugging it out for eyeballs and market share. At TATA.ev before that, he cut his teeth on customer insight and planning, budgeting and forecasting, skills that translate rather neatly into the world of packaged foods, where margins are thinner and consumer attention spans thinner still.
Before Tata, Sayed’s résumé reads like a tour of Indian media agencies. He was director, and before that associate director, at Carat, part of the Dentsu network, handling stakeholder management and campaign strategy. Earlier stints at Mindshare as media strategist, PHD as group head on the Kinder portfolio for Ferrero, OMD India, MediaCom and Allied Media Network rounded out a grounding in media planning that spans nearly a decade before he crossed over to the client side.
That trajectory, agency to advertiser, is a well worn one in Indian marketing circles, and Sayed’s version of it looks particularly well timed. Unilever’s foods business, home to brands that dominate Indian kitchens, is leaning harder into digital as consumption habits shift and e-commerce eats into traditional retail. A media planner’s eye for data and budgeting, sharpened over years of pivot tables and campaign audits, is exactly the sort of pedigree that FMCG giants now prize as they chase performance marketing gains alongside brand equity.
For Sayed personally, the Unilever posting marks a return to category leadership after client-side stints in the automotive sector, and a chance to apply consumer insight chops built across gaming, cars and trendspotting, interests he flags openly on his profile, to the rather more mundane but lucrative business of getting Indians to buy soup and ketchup.
