Achyuth Chirravuri Joins UMM Skincare As Brand Marketing Lead
UMM Skincare has appointed Achyuth Chirravuri as brand marketing lead, bringing in a strategist from Dentsu India as the brand extends its wellness offering around bathing, spas and experiences.
- Appointment: brand marketing lead, UMM Skincare
- Previously: associate director, strategy, Dentsu India
- Dentsu clients included Ferrero, Prudential, Intel, Standard Chartered, Tata Neu, Meesho, Tata Croma, Yes Bank, McCain Foods, TimesPro and WWE
- Earlier: Interactive Avenues and HATCH
- Remit: culture, consumer behaviour, luxury and brand building
What Achyuth Chirravuri Is Being Hired To Do
The remit as described is broader than a product marketing brief. Culture, consumer behaviour, luxury and brand building, for a company expanding from skincare into bathing experiences, spas and experiences generally.
That combination points at a specific problem. A skincare brand sells a formulation and can compete on ingredients and results. A wellness brand built around bathing and spas is selling a ritual, and rituals are sold on meaning rather than on efficacy. The two require different marketing entirely, and the second is much closer to strategy than to product communications.
The Range In The Client List
The roster behind him is unusually wide for someone moving into beauty: Ferrero, Prudential, Intel, Standard Chartered, Tata Neu, Meesho, Tata Croma, Yes Bank, McCain Foods, TimesPro and WWE.
Confectionery, insurance, semiconductors, banking, marketplaces, retail, education and entertainment is not a specialism. It is a training in finding the argument that makes an unfamiliar category legible, which is exactly the skill a brand needs when it is trying to persuade Indian consumers that a bath is a considered purchase.
Why Brands Like This Hire From Strategy
A young wellness brand does not usually need someone to run more campaigns. It needs someone to decide what the brand is for, in a category crowded with claims that all sound alike.
Agency strategy is where that work gets done, and associate director is the level at which a strategist has stopped writing decks for someone else's argument and started building the argument. Moving that person in-house, and giving them the brand rather than a brief, is a bet that positioning is the constraint rather than execution.
The Category Context
Indian beauty and personal care has spent several years being reshaped by direct-to-consumer brands that grew on performance marketing and are now discovering its ceiling. The next stage for most of them is building something that a customer will pay a premium for without a discount code attached.
Luxury sits in the stated remit for that reason. It is not a description of the price point so much as of the ambition.
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