Mindshare picks John Thangaraj as Head of Strategy for North

Mindshare today announced the appointment of John Thangaraj as the Head of Strategy for the Northern region. In his new role, John will assume responsibility for the Mindshare strategy product across Delhi clients.

John brings To Mindshare, a rich experience of over 12 years spanning a marketing role at Adidas, a research role at Quantum and as Head of strategic planning for Redifffusion Y&R.

In his last role John was Vice President – Strategic Planning at Lowe, where he was responsible for the product planning on a cluster of brands that included Wills Lifestyle, Nestle Confectionary, Hindustan Times, Dabur Real, Shine.com, Woodland, Expedia.co.in and OLX.in.

In addition to his last set of clients at Lowe, John’s experience spans FMCG’s such as Danone, Amway, Pepsico, Consumer electronics (LG), Alcoholic Beverages (Bacardi) and Travel portals (Yatra).

John is extremely proud of the Effie’s & Cannes that he has worked hard to win over the years. These include- Effie 2010 for Hindustan Times' 'It Is Time' brand campaign, Effie 2012 for Hindustan Times' 'You Read, They Learn' campaign, and Media Lion at Cannes 2013for Best Use of Print for Hindustan Times' 'You Read, They Learn'.

He is also very proud of the work that he did when he led a global strategic project for LG Korea in 2009 on understanding the super affluent consumers in India.

John’s is an avid F1 fan. His other interests include adventure sports, fitness, dogs, rock, metal, sci-fi, fantasy, horror and comic books. He spends most of his free time reading, listening to obnoxiously loud metal and playing with his 8 year old Labrador retriever (who doesn't appreciate the obnoxiously loud metal). John has been collecting comic books since he was 7 and he thinks The Lord of The Rings is the greatest book ever written. He has never read The Fountainhead and never intends to.

Announcing the appointment, Alok Sinha, Leader - Strategy (South Asia) said, “We are glad to welcome John to Mindshare & the extended GroupM family. He’s got category and industry experience, and is a great team leader. I am confident he will be able to lead the strategy division to even greater heights.”

Ravi Rao, Leader South Asia, Mindshare said, “I am pleased to welcome John. He has the combination between being imaginative, strategic and entrepreneurial that our strategy community and clients need."

Commenting on what he hopes to achieve at Mindshare John said, “First and foremost, I hope to future proof myself. I have a strong belief in the fact that 'advertising' as is currently practiced in India does not have a shelf life of more than a decade (at the very most).

Consumption of information and entertainment is rapidly moving screens and I feel that Mindshare is on the cutting edge of optimizing and leveraging this. 'Digital' has become a buzz word we all love to throw around, and I am looking to Mindshare to help me make the journey from 'thinking about digital' to 'thinking digitally'. Perhaps most of all, Mindshare represents a new journey for me- new skills to acquire, new people to meet and new challenges to deal with. Which is what excites me the most about it.”