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Nikhil Soni Takes Brand And Marketing At HCL Group

Ad Tribe! Bureau2 min read
Nikhil Soni, named head of brand and marketing at HCL Group, with a remit across brand, sports, culture, learning and environment

Nikhil Soni has been named head of brand and marketing at HCL Group, with a remit covering brand, sports, culture, learning and environment.

  • Role: head of brand and marketing, HCL Group, effective July 2026
  • Previously: assistant general manager at HCL Group, covering brand, growth and product go-to-market
  • At HCL since: August 2015, joining as manager, marketing
  • Experience: twelve years across higher education and media and entertainment

What Nikhil Soni Has Been Building

The work most visible from outside is HCL Concerts, which the company says has gone from two cities to ten, and now runs more than twenty concerts and sixty digital streams a year. HCL puts attendance above thirty thousand live and online viewing above 1.2 million, and reports a 35 per cent share of voice for the property. Those figures come from the company rather than an independent audit.

Around the concerts sits a set of smaller properties: Baithak, Carnatic Quest, Raaga Collective and The Great Indian Classical Podcast, alongside the HCL Music app, which the company reports at over 200,000 installs and a 4.2-star rating.

Why Classical Music Is An Unusual Brand Asset

Indian corporate sponsorship concentrates on cricket and film, where the audience is large and the association is cheap to explain. Classical music is the opposite: a smaller audience, a slower build and almost no transfer of celebrity.

What it offers instead is something sponsorship rarely buys, which is a property the company owns outright rather than rents. A decade of it produces a durable association that cannot be outbid at the next auction, which is the argument for the patience it takes.

The Rest Of The Record

Soni started as a software engineer at HCLTech before moving through banking and consulting roles at Citibank India, Hexagon Consulting and Francorp Advisors, then admissions marketing at Sharda Group. Since 2020 the work has included performance marketing and demand generation at Shiv Nadar University Chennai, where HCL reports admissions revenue up 140 per cent across five cycles.

Soni has been recognised among India's Top 100 Digital Marketers by Paul Writer and in the Adobe Digi100. More people moves.

#Sponsorship#Appointments#Culture#HCL Group#Brand Marketing
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