AIM-NITIE Workshop on Consumer Insights Research & Practice

Charles Assisi is a co-founder at Founding Fuel Publishing, a media and learning platform. Most recently, he wrote his first book “The Aadhaar Effect: Why the World’s Largest Identity Program Matters” with his colleague NS Ramnath. The book is published by Oxford University Press and is scheduled for a formal India launch in November 2018 and other parts of world beginning January 2019. He continually stays engaged with thought leaders from India and across the world to write on entrepreneurship. His works has earned him the Polestar Award and Madhu Valluri Award for journalism. In earlier avatars, he was managing editor at Forbes (India) and National Business Editor at the Times of India. He has spent time across various newsrooms in Europe with media conglomerate Vogel Burda.

Denish Shah is the Barbara and Elmer Sunday Professor at Georgia State University. His research lies at the intersection of technology, marketing strategy, and firm performance. Dr. Shah's research has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Harvard Business Review, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Sloan Management Review and several other outlets. He is a 2015 MSI Young Scholar and recipient of 6 teaching excellence awards. Recently, he received the 2018 Varadarajan Award for Early Career Contributions to Marketing Strategy research from the American Marketing Association (AMA). Prior to his academic career, Dr. Shah worked for multinational corporations in USA and India.

Neeraj Pandey is Associate Professor of Marketing at NITIE Mumbai. He did his Post-Doc at Johns Hopkins University, USA in the area of healthcare pricing. He has authored two Books besides publications in reputed journals. He received ‘Best Teacher’ award by NITIE Mumbai; ‘AIMS-IRMA Outstanding Management Researcher Award’ by AIMS International and ‘Young Management Researcher’ award by Higher Education Forum (HEF).He has done consultancy assignments for many organizations including Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd., MRF Limited, BPCL, Gujarat State Fertilizers & Chemicals Limited (GSFCL), Owens Corning Limited, Marpol, HPCL, Diligent Media Corporation, EMCO Transformers, ONGC, etc.. He is also Coordinator, Consumer Insight Centre at NITIE Mumbai.

Prakash Nedungadi is the Group Head for Consumer Insights and Brand Development at the Aditya Birla Group, a $41 bln global conglomerate based out of India. Prior to this, Prakash has worked for over 27 years in various leading roles in Marketing, Sales and General Management at companies such as Unilever, Gillette and Procter & Gamble across several product categories and leading global brands like Gillette, Lipton, Braun, Duracell and Wall’s, amongst others. He was CEO for Madura Garments, India’s leading branded apparel business within the Aditya Birla Group. In his current role, Prakash performs a central role in the Aditya Birla Group, working with the Group’s B2B and B2C businesses on developing strong customer preference and building powerful brands through deep insighting, customer centric culture and design and innovation.

Saurin Shah is the head of consumer and market insights at Godrej Consumer Products. He partners the growth journey at GCPL with his strategic insighting on the business and innovations through the lens of the consumer. Saurin has 20 years of experience in consumer insighting, having led the same at Vodafone and at Unilever in various roles including his leadership role for Laundry South Asia, Global Water Sustainability and Global Matics. He has collected rich knowledge of consumers across continents while based out of Mumbai, Dubai, Cairo and Moscow in various roles. He is currently a member and office bearer of the Managing Committee at MRSI (Market Research Society of India).

Shyam Sunder Suri, an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, is CEO of Magus. He co-founded Marketing Business Associates (MBA), India’s first independent Market Research company. He was involved in Research and Business Development & Client Relationship Management in MBA till the early 1990’s. He co-founded and conceptualized the setting up of Magus Customer Dialog Pvt Ltd in early 1989. Magus is India’s earliest BPOs, providing customer retention services to clients in India and a pioneer in this field. He has been deeply involved in various facets of Magus in the past 29 years. He has a good understanding of various Industry segments like Financial Services, Retail, Consumer Services etc from a perspective of customer interactions and how they need to be managed and delivered in the Indian context to Indian consumers. His primary thrust has been in developing and managing Client Relationship and new service offerings. He has also served on the Board of High Mark Credit Information Services, IOTL Services Ltd as an Independent Director.