Facebook India Gets New Chief with New Focus on Consumer Marketing

New Delhi (Sputnik): Despite several data breach scandals, social networking giant Facebook has managed to keep its game rolling across the globe. With over 269 million users, India makes for one of Facebook’s leading markets with a massive user base.

On Friday, Facebook roped in Avinash Pant, a former alumnus of the premier Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad to head the marketing division in India.

Pant, who had previously been associated with popular brands including Red Bull, The Walt Disney Company, Nike and Coca Cola will focus on Facebook’s consumer-marketing strategies for all of its platforms, including the instant messaging app WhatsApp, photo-messaging app Instagram and the primary app Facebook.

As part of his new assignment, Pant will report directly to Facebook India’s Vice President and Managing Director Ajit Mohan, who reports to the California, US-based head office.

Towards the end of 2019, Facebook recruited new people for key roles across its Marketing, Sales, Partnership and Policy sectors.

Consumer marketing is a new area of exploration for Facebook, through which the social networking major plans on aggregating its investments with direct communication.

In 2019, Facebook initiated programmes dedicated to budding women entrepreneurs from tier two and three Indian cities.

It made its first minority investment in Indian social e-commerce platform Meesho that enables small businesses and entrepreneurs to kick-start their online stores via WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

WhatsApp has been locking horns with the Indian government over data-traceability and Facebook shared its Transparency Report that showed that out of the 22,684 queries the Indian government made between January-June 2019, the social networking platform had provided data in 54 per cent of cases.