PepsiCo's Vibha Rishi to join Future group

NEW DELHI: Former PepsiCo high-flyer Vibha Paul Rishi is set to return to India after around seven years overseas and join Kishore Biyani’s Future Group, potentially boosting the marketing firepower of India’s top retail group.

Several people familiar with the matter told ET that Ms Rishi, a veteran of India’s Cola wars of the 1990s, would join the Future Group at the ‘director level’ in April.

“Details are being sorted out,” said one person, a senior Future Group official, requesting anonymity. While both Mr Biyani and Ms Rishi were unavailable for comment, Future Group’s HR head Sanjay Jog neither confirmed nor denied the development. “We have not yet finalised anything,” he said in an e-mailed reply.

Ms Rishi, who is in her late 40s and is a mother of two, spent 17 years at PepsiCo and was its marketing head in India before moving to New York in 2003. In India, she is best known for PepsiCo’s cheeky ‘Nothing official about it’ campaign that mocked arch-rival Coca-Cola’s official sponsorship of the 1996 cricket World Cup.

An alumnus of the Tata Administrative Service and an MBA from Delhi’s FMS, Ms Rishi moved to PepsiCo’s headquarters to be a part of its international marketing team and looked after non-Cola brands such as 7up and Mirinda. She quit the company in 2007.

Since then, she has been associated with Pratham, a non-governmental organisation that works to provide education to underprivileged children in India.

In her India stint, Ms Rishi worked with PepsiCo heads Suman Sinha and Rajeev Bakshi.

The Future Group has seen a series of high-profile exits in recent years, notably senior executives such as Sanjeev Gupta, Jayant Khosla, Shashi Kalathil and Prakash Iyer.