Airtel's Govind Rajan joins Snapdeal as chief strategy officer

Snapdeal has announced the appointment of Govind Rajan as the chief strategy officer, effective August 2015. Prior to this, he most recently served as chief marketing officer (B2C) at Bharti Airtel, where he was responsible for revenue and market share growth, customer life cycle management, and building marketing capability across the organisation. Concurrently, he also served as CEO - Airtel Money (Airtel M-commerce Services Limited), leading Airtel's foray in the world of mobile money and payments.

Before joining Airtel, Rajan was with Hindustan Unilever (HUL). He joined HUL as a management trainee in 1997, before serving in various marketing and leadership roles. In his tenure at HUL, which lasted over 15 years, he worked across a range of categories and also led sales teams in varied terrain and a wide variety of channels - from modern trade to rural.

While at HUL, he was the regional vice president South Asia, managing the skin cleansing category and prior to that, vice president for the skin care business. He also served as the customer marketing and sales operations head of HUL.

In these roles, he was responsible for driving the P&L, portfolio management across brands, building new categories such as body lotions and face wash.

In February 2010, Kunal Bahl, along with Rohit Bansal, started Snapdeal.com. The company claims to have millions of users and 150,000 sellers delivering in over 5000 cities and towns in India. The company has recently acquired Freecharge. Snapdeal has investments from SoftBank, BlackRock, Temasek, eBay Inc., Premji Invest, Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Ratan Tata, among others.