BCCL Hires FMCG Veteran Badri Beriwal to Rethink Brand Portfolio
The Times of India parent BCCL hires Badri Beriwal to lead brand and portfolio strategy. Here's what that signals for brand-led growth.
When a legacy publishing house hires someone from biscuits, footwear and retail to run brand strategy, it is worth paying attention. Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL), parent of The Times of India, has appointed Badri Beriwal as Director – Brand, Product & Portfolio Strategy.
Beriwal arrives after leading strategy and business development at Bata India and, before that, new business at Britannia and the Britannia–Chipita joint venture. His resume also includes Stanley Black & Decker, Veeba Foods, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Walmart.
From selling reach to managing a brand portfolio
For decades, many media companies behaved like distribution platforms: build audience, sell attention, repeat. Beriwal’s mandate signals a different operating model. According to the announcement, he will focus on brand and portfolio strategy, product innovation, brand-led IPs, audience engagement and new business creation across BCCL’s publishing businesses.
That language is closer to an FMCG brand manager’s brief than a traditional media sales brief. The underlying bet is that a publishing group can create, stretch and retire brands the way a consumer goods company manages a shelf.
Why a cross-category career matters
Beriwal’s background spans very different buying cycles. FMCG is habitual and low-involvement. Retail is experience-heavy and location-led. Platform businesses are network-led. A leader who has worked across all three is likely to ask questions a pure media executive might not:
- What mental category does each brand own?
- Which brands deserve investment, and which are cannibalising the portfolio?
- Where can a publishing brand credibly extend into products, events or communities?
- How do we measure audience engagement beyond page views and impressions?
That is the logic of portfolio strategy: not making every brand bigger, but making the whole system healthier.
The signalling effect for Indian media
Legacy media groups in India are under pressure from digital platforms, changing advertiser expectations and fragmented attention. Hiring a portfolio strategist from FMCG and retail suggests BCCL wants to treat its mastheads less like fixed assets and more like growth platforms. That matters because strong consumer brands can command pricing and loyalty in ways that undifferentiated reach cannot.
Beriwal’s brief to create new revenue streams is the quiet part said aloud. It is not just about protecting print or chasing digital traffic; it is about asking what else the brand can credibly be.
What brand managers can steal from this move
The appointment is a useful reminder that brand portfolios need explicit roles. In classic brand architecture, a house of brands keeps identities separate, while a branded house extends one master brand. Legacy publishers often sit somewhere in between: multiple mastheads, uneven equity, unclear relationships.
The job-to-be-done for a reader scanning The Times of India may be very different from the job for a niche supplement or a brand-led intellectual property. If Beriwal applies even a simple role-based portfolio audit, BCCL could make sharper calls about where to stretch equity and where to protect it.
For founders and marketing leaders, the takeaway is simpler: treat your brand architecture as a product. Assign each brand a role, a target audience and a growth thesis. Then let that role decide distribution, pricing and innovation, not the other way around.
Source: Indian Advertising Media & Marketing News – exchange4media
