Over the last 15 years, Lightspeed has partnered with nearly 100 companies in India and Southeast Asia, many of which were really early — as early as pre-powerpoint in many cases. At this early stage, the founders’ vision is clear but their company’s growth path is anything but straightforward. We realized that we can best serve our founders by participating together as they forge this path — in addition to support on talent, organizational design, growth and financings, we are now adding brand by welcoming Carina Chopra as our Head of Marketing.
Able to wear strategic and executional hats with equal ease, Carina has kicked off multiple partnerships, content platforms and events. She has provided strategic input to several of our founders, including identifying the right execution experts for their marketing and brand initiatives. She has also built out the team, including bringing on board Tanvi Bhatia to lead Community efforts at Lightspeed India.
While each company goes through their individual journey, we have seen that the best founders consistently get started early on brand building. Creating a solid brand and narrative for the company has ripple effects in attracting customers, talent, capital — and converting these stakeholders into brand evangelists. And the brand promise is the holy grail from which stem critical decisions on UX/packaging, design, channel choices and many more. Consumers and customers are today plugged into a river of information, increasingly from across time-zones, and this is why it is absolutely important for companies to build their brand with authenticity — which is what makes them stand out.
The proliferation of marketing avenues, the nuances of balancing between growth vs. imagery, investing ahead vs. in line with growth — all of these make brand building an increasingly complex role. We believe it is important to have a leader of our own, who can be a true thought partner for our founders and for us on this journey.
We are delighted to introduce Carina who joined us last year, after 13 years at Unilever, where she was most recently Global Brand Director. She has built expertise in crafting and building brands, leading teams, as well as driving content, strategy & innovation verticals across the Unilever personal care portfolio, including on brands like Lakme & Lux among others. She has already had impact with several of our portfolio companies.
Carina joined Unilever from St. Stephen’s College. Her first assignment was managing a 25 person strong sales team. Over the years, she has been recognised as Ad-Week CMO Mentee 2020 and selected as a Cannes Young Lion. She is passionate about people, storytelling, brands and bringing ideas to life — all of which bring about a sense of empathy, energy and even urgency to her work with founders.
In her spare time Carina likes to write, coach and build things. Having completed a film-screenplay she is in the process of editing her short volume of humorous poetry ‘An Ode to Ordinary Things’ written during successive waves of the pandemic, while also volunteering time under her platform ‘Beam’ to help young women navigate the workplace in the formative years of their careers.
In discovering and serving founders that shape the future, we understand that each company is unique. And so is every member on our team. We’re proud to have Carina and Tanvi on board, and look forward to you getting to know them better.
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