Top 25 eCommerce leaders 2022: Shankar Viswanathan

Shankar Viswanathan (pictured) is the head (senior VP) of eCommerce for P&G for Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa where he is responsible for all product lines across these regions.

A veteran executive, he has spent more than 32 years at P&G across a range of businesses and countries, holding prominent positions such as managing director in Vietnam, and president in the Philippines. In his current role, he is tasked to grow the business, build profitability, and build the best organisation with the best capabilities in the industry.

Viswanathan takes immense pride in expanding the P&G business across the region, building deep and productive win-win relationships with customers, and serving and delighting them with the best brands.

Recalling his extensive career, he shared that his team was one of the first in the industry to develop new media and marketing tools for precision targeting; surrogate-based targeting; creating joint data capabilities across the spectrum; and extensive work on paid and organic search in its early days.

Deeply passionate about transforming businesses and organisations to create sustained winning results, he has developed a deep experience and expertise in digitisation and eCommerce in various market situations and trade structures.

“I am committed to being a force for good to improve the lives of the community, employees, and creating a better environment, and I have been a champion of ESG,” he said.

When asked what some of his main challenges had been in the past three years, he said a lot of work had to be in-house given the market saw a lack of a well-developed supplier ecosystem.

“COVID-19 was obviously a huge challenge in terms of the supply chain, and creating significant availability issues for everyone in the chain and hurting the consumer sentiment and perception,” he said.

Availability and building the talent across this vast region, and making key decisions on what should be centralised, regionalised and localised, were also some key issues many marketers faced, he said.

Viswanathan is also someone who gets excited about transforming business models. He has led and transformed businesses across several generations and formats of retail, including digital and eCommerce, start-ups, emerging, developed and developing economies.

“I lead, I enable, I build, and I partner by accelerating the development of strategic frameworks, grooming talent, and building foundational capabilities across all parts of the business: sales, marketing, media, supply chain, IT, analytics, and insights,” he said.

“These interventions have consistently delivered best in class results in the industry and worldwide.”