Shivaraj Subramaniam heads the Consumer Centricity practice at the Aditya Birla Group. Prior to this, Shiv was the Head of Omni Channel and Consumer Practices, at Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited – India’s largest branded Apparel Company.
In this role, he was instrumental in building a strong foundation for consumer centric practices; creating an agenda for organisational transformation around emerging consumer realities; and established a Centre of Excellence for Digital and Analytics. In addition to this, he was heading the Ecommerce channel for Madura Fashion and Lifestyle. During his 9-year tenure at ABFRL, he led the design and implementation of several consumer centric first practices. These have since then gone on to be fully absorbed within the organisation to develop a new normal. A few of his specific achievements include:
- Setting up the apparel industry’s most advanced VOC capability via the Net Promoter System, which has connected over 900 brick and mortar stores of the company, and has received over 3 million customer voices in store; over 250,000 live conversations through dedicated customer care centre; and close to US$ 5M of additional revenue through close to-market improvisations.
- Setting up the country’s first state-of- the-art social media command centre in ABFRL’s digitisation journey that has now evolved into a full-fledged in-house digital services capability. The Epic Centre was referred to by the Chairman in his ABG Awards address in December 2015, as a significant consumer-centric initiative he had come across
- Architecting and taking live ABFRL’s omni channel capability to seamlessly link offline and online experiences for consumers; while providing a single view of the customer along with a single view of inventory.
- Establishing a fully capable Analytics practice centred around solving live business problems and closing customer feedback loops
- Migration of ABFRL’s stand-alone Ecommerce platform into independent Brand Ecommerce channels, while establishing profitable partnerships with Marketplaces and Aggregators.
Shiv was also the Head of Marketing for Van Heusen from 2008 to 2011, during which the brandturned a CAGR of 25% annually. Prior to joining ABFRL, Shiv was the Marketing Head at ArvindBrands – where he helped shape the course of its flagship brand – Arrow.
Following a post-graduation in Advertising and Communications Management, Shiv pursued a career in Advertising/Communications, and spent close to 13 years across both specialist and mainstream agencies. In addition to this, he has been involved in two start-ups – one in the area of Mobile Payments, and the other in Travel.