Mridul Srivastava, Head of India Marketing and AMEA Lead, Customer Strategy, BT
Mridul Srivastava brings to the table more than 20 years of experience across telecom, IT and technology marketing. He currently heads the marketing division for British Telecom (BT) in India and also leads customer strategy for the Asia-Pacific, and Middle East and Africa regions.
Srivastava is a core member of BT’s India leadership team. He joined the company in 2007 and was part of the team involved in defining the company’s India strategy and business planning initiatives. Prior to joining BT, he was director marketing, AOL Mobile in India, where he was responsible for AOL’s embedded software and mobile application business.
Srivastava is of the view that telecom technology has grown rapidly in the consumer space. However, the enterprise space has not been able to match this pace. Today, telecom and IT have become almost inseparable, and, as far as the enterprise sector is concerned, a different approach is needed. “Indian enterprises today are at varying stages of the technology adoption lifecycle. While we have some enterprises that are innovators or early adopters, there are many enterprises much behind in this adoption curve. As such, keeping pace with rapid changes in the enterprise networked IT market is the biggest challenge that the industry faces. Meanwhile, a major transformation that has taken place is the move from the traditional marketing approach to digital platforms. This has opened up unlimited avenues for customer interaction and made the marketer’s task more exciting.”
For Srivastava, every assignment has been memorable. The room for experimenting and bringing in definitive change is what excites him in any assignment that he takes on. “Being a strategy person at heart, I always look at the big picture and the impact the assignment will have on it,” he says. Srivastava believes in delegating work and allowing people to learn while on the job. “I not only encourage people to bring new ideas to the table, but also support them in taking calculated risks,” he comments.
Srivastava is a chemical engineer by training and also holds a management degree in marketing and finance. He is an avid reader as well as a writer, and writes a blog on technology marketing. He unwinds by listening to music and enjoys both Indian and western classical music, Ustad Rashid Khan being his current favourite. He likes to spend his spare time with his family, playing scrabble with them and practising lessons on the piano.
