India's marketing and brand industry has produced a significant number of women in senior leadership roles, from CMOs at global multinationals to founders of independent creative and strategy firms. This list documents some of them. It includes the Group CMO of one of India's largest diversified conglomerates, the Global CMO of a major IT services company, the Chief Brand Officer of a 125-year-old Indian conglomerate, the CMO of Diageo India, the CMO of Honasa Consumer's full brand portfolio, and several founders who have built platforms at the intersection of creativity, communication, and brand strategy. The scope of the marketing conversation has shifted considerably in the last decade: digital transformation, data-driven marketing, community building, and the expectation of brand accountability on social issues have all changed what marketing leadership requires. The speakers listed here have navigated those changes from the inside, as practitioners managing significant budgets and large teams. Their insights are operational rather than theoretical. This list is a resource for marketing conferences, brand forums, and corporate learning programmes that want speakers who have made the decisions they are describing.
1. Nischala Agnihotri
Founder, Story Scientist
Nischala Agnihotri is the founder of Story Scientist, a platform focused on helping professionals and organisations communicate more effectively through structured storytelling. She is also a LinkedIn Learning instructor with widely viewed courses on professional communication, personal branding, and storytelling for business. Her work spans individual professional coaching, corporate learning programmes, and public content creation with a substantial following. She speaks on storytelling and business communication, personal branding for professionals, LinkedIn and professional visibility at scale, the craft of presenting ideas with clarity and structure, and building a content-led business in the creator economy. Her audience includes marketing professionals, senior executives, and professionals seeking to develop their communication and presence. She brings a practitioner's specific knowledge of how stories work inside and outside organisations, with a particular focus on the B2B professional context.
2. Anurita Chopra
CMO, India Subcontinent, Haleon
Anurita Chopra is Chief Marketing Officer for Haleon's India Subcontinent operations. Haleon is a global consumer health company, formerly the consumer healthcare division of GSK, with a brand portfolio including Sensodyne, Centrum, Voltaren, and Panadol. Her role involves overseeing marketing strategy for a portfolio of established healthcare brands across one of the world's largest and most complex consumer markets, where health literacy varies significantly and channel complexity is high. She speaks on marketing strategy in healthcare and FMCG, brand building for health and wellness categories, consumer insight and research methodology for Indian markets, marketing leadership in large multinational organisations, and the dynamics of managing a portfolio of established brands in a rapidly changing media environment. Her perspective is shaped by deep experience at the intersection of health, consumer behaviour, and brand management.
3. Gayatri Sethi
Founder, CtrlA India
Gayatri Sethi is the founder of CtrlA India, a marketing strategy and brand consulting firm. She brings experience from senior marketing roles inside large organisations to independent consulting, which gives her the dual perspective of having managed marketing from the inside of a company and from the outside as an adviser. Her speaking topics include marketing strategy and brand architecture, the value of marketing as a business function rather than a cost centre, entrepreneurship in professional services, career development for marketing professionals at mid-to-senior levels, and the practical decisions involved in building a consulting brand. She speaks at marketing conferences, brand forums, and corporate events on the craft of building brand strategy grounded in business objectives, and what separates effective brand strategy from generic activity. CtrlA India's cross-sector client base gives her a comparative view of marketing decision-making across industries.
4. Aparna Bhawal
CMO, KFC India and Partner Countries
Aparna Bhawal is Chief Marketing Officer for KFC India and Partner Countries, overseeing the marketing strategy for one of India's most prominent quick-service restaurant chains in the second-largest population market globally. KFC India has undertaken significant marketing work to localise a global fast food brand for Indian consumer sensibilities across different regions, price points, vegetarian preference distributions, and digital consumption habits. Managing marketing for a brand at that scale and complexity, within the constraints of a global brand system, is a substantive and high-visibility role. She speaks on brand marketing in quick-service restaurants, marketing localisation for global brands in India, consumer marketing strategy and execution at scale, the dynamics of digital and social marketing for a fast-food brand, and leadership in marketing inside large multinational franchise businesses.
5. Tista Sen
Founder, TistaThinks
Tista Sen is one of India's most recognised advertising creatives, with a career spanning major campaigns for leading Indian and multinational brands across several decades at major agencies. She founded TistaThinks as a consulting and creative strategy platform. Her background in advertising creative direction gives her talks a different texture from most marketing speakers: she thinks about communication itself, about what makes an idea land or fail, about the conditions in which creative work is produced, and about the relationship between creative integrity and commercial objectives. She speaks on brand building and advertising, creativity and commercial communication, the evolution of Indian advertising over the last three decades, women in creative leadership, the craft of long-form storytelling in marketing, and the economics of creative work inside large agency structures.
6. Anuja Mishra
CMO, Honasa Consumer (Mamaearth, BBLUNT, The Derma Co)
Anuja Mishra is Chief Marketing Officer of Honasa Consumer, the listed parent company of multiple consumer brands including Mamaearth, BBLUNT, and The Derma Co. Managing marketing across a portfolio of brands at different stages of development, with different target demographics and different channel strategies, is a demanding and specific discipline. She is responsible for the marketing strategy of brands that between them cover skincare, haircare, and personal care, collectively representing one of India's fastest-growing listed consumer companies. She speaks on portfolio brand marketing, direct-to-consumer growth and marketing strategy, building brand equity across digital and retail channels in India, marketing leadership inside a fast-growing public company, and the specific dynamics of marketing in beauty and personal care, a category that is simultaneously competitive, expanding, and undergoing significant structural change driven by D2C platforms.
7. Arpita Bhawal
Director, RR Donnelley
Arpita Bhawal is a Director at RR Donnelley, a global integrated services company providing marketing, business communications, and supply chain services to enterprise clients. Her role involves managing relationships and projects at the enterprise level, which places her at the intersection of marketing services, outsourced content production, and large-scale business communications. She brings to her speaking work the perspective of someone working on the execution and delivery side of marketing at industrial scale, which is distinct from the brand strategy and creative end of the spectrum. Her speaking topics include marketing communications and content production at scale, integrated services and outsourcing in the marketing function, career development in marketing operations and services, and leadership for women in professional services organisations. She speaks at industry events on the operational realities of managing complex marketing output inside large organisations.
8. Tanya Dubash
Executive Director and Chief Brand Officer, Godrej Group
Tanya Dubash is Executive Director and Chief Brand Officer of Godrej Group, one of India's oldest and most diversified conglomerates, with business interests spanning consumer goods, real estate, agriculture, aerospace, and financial services across more than 125 years of operation. As Chief Brand Officer, she oversees the identity and positioning of a brand that must remain relevant across a portfolio that includes products used by hundreds of millions of Indian households, while also being a member of the founding family. Her talks address brand strategy for heritage organisations, the specific challenge of building and maintaining a multigenerational brand in a market undergoing rapid change, family business governance and the dynamics of professional management within a family enterprise, and the intersection of legacy and innovation in brand building. She offers a perspective that very few marketing speakers can provide: the view from inside one of India's oldest and most widely distributed brands.
9. Geetika Anand Gupta
Co-Founder and Chief Pilot, MOPP Foods
Geetika Anand Gupta is the co-founder of MOPP Foods, a specialty food enterprise, and holds the title of Chief Pilot, a positioning choice that reflects the company's approach to building with intention and ownership. MOPP Foods operates in the specialty food and nutrition space, which requires navigating regulatory compliance, supply chain complexity, and the particular challenge of building consumer trust in a category where claims are heavily scrutinised. Her speaking work as a food entrepreneur covers product development and brand building in food, the regulatory environment for food businesses in India, marketing food products to a health-conscious and discerning consumer base, co-founding and running a consumer goods company, and entrepreneurship in a supply-chain-intensive category. She speaks at entrepreneurship events and food industry forums.
10. Ruchira Jaitly
CMO, Diageo India
Ruchira Jaitly is Chief Marketing Officer of Diageo India, leading the marketing strategy for one of the world's largest premium spirits companies' operations in its largest market by volume. Diageo India's portfolio spans international prestige brands including Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, and Black and White alongside homegrown Indian brands with large domestic followings including Royal Challenge and McDowell's. Marketing in the alcoholic beverages sector in India operates under specific and significant regulatory constraints on advertising, which makes the discipline there particularly creative, digital-forward, and reliant on experiential and community-based approaches rather than mass broadcast. She speaks on brand marketing in regulated categories, managing a portfolio spanning prestige and mass market brands simultaneously, marketing strategy for alcoholic beverages in India, and leadership in marketing roles inside major multinationals.
11. Deepali Naair
Group CMO, CK Birla Group
Deepali Naair is Group Chief Marketing Officer of CK Birla Group, one of India's major diversified conglomerates with businesses in automotive components, healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Group CMO at a conglomerate of this complexity requires synthesising marketing strategy across very different categories, buyer psychologies, channels, and competitive dynamics, making it a distinctive and demanding senior marketing role. She has extensive previous experience in insurance and financial services marketing, which brings a specific understanding of high-complexity, high-trust categories to her work. She speaks on marketing leadership in diversified organisations, financial services marketing and the trust dynamics that govern it, brand building in categories with complex buyer journeys, the role of data and analytics in modern marketing strategy, and career development in senior marketing roles.
12. Ranjita Ghosh
Global CMO, Wipro
Ranjita Ghosh is Global Chief Marketing Officer at Wipro, one of India's largest information technology and services companies with operations across more than 65 countries. Global CMO at a major IT services company is a role with particular characteristics: the buyers of enterprise IT services are sophisticated procurement organisations and senior technical decision-makers, sales cycles are long, and brand differentiation is difficult in a category where all major players offer similar capabilities. Her work involves positioning Wipro as a distinct choice in a crowded field of large, well-capitalised competitors, which requires deep knowledge of enterprise buyer psychology, analyst and media relations, and the global channels through which IT services contracts are evaluated and awarded. She speaks on B2B technology marketing, marketing for professional services and IT services companies, global marketing strategy, and leadership in marketing roles at large multinational organisations.
About Draupadi on the Dais
The marketing and brand industry in India has some of the most interesting and analytically rigorous senior women in any sector. They have managed brands worth thousands of crores, navigated the shift to digital across multiple company cycles, and built the creative and strategic work that shapes how hundreds of millions of Indian consumers understand the products they use. Their presence on marketing conference stages should be routine. Draupadi on the Dais verifies professional standing before any profile goes live. If you are running a marketing summit, a brand strategy forum, a CMO roundtable, or a corporate marketing learning programme, the speakers on this list bring the operational depth that changes the quality of the conversation.
Browse the full Women Marketing and Brand Speakers roster on Draupadi on the Dais.