40 Under 40 2020: Anmol Gill, Bacardi India

Anmol Gill

Customer marketing head
Bacardi
India

Don’t get the wrong impression, but at Bacardi, Anmol Gill’s glass is never empty. What we mean is that she leads nine separate teams that run all of Bacardi brands’ activations, their integrated commercial planning and their channels of communication across India and neighbouring markets in Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Add to that all the recent challenges of Covid lockdown requiring the utmost agility in shifting brand experiences, budgets and strategies to meet new regulations and changing consumer behaviours across borders. One might say her glass is overflowing.

Yet Gill and her teams have risen to the challenge, innovating to keep the passion-points behind each brand of spirits alive. Whether it’s dance, music or food, Gill’s marketing troupe has been able to conceptualise new online experiences with amazing results. From Dewar’s Doers Club and gourmet food and drink content series ‘You Got Chef’d!’, to Bacardi’s virtual concerts, #PassTheBeat initiative and its #BreezerShuffle attempt to add fun to household chores, their efforts found new ways of reaching consumers in their homes, garnering millions of customer interactions along the way.  

As passionate as Gill is about engaging consumers, she is even more emboldened by finding ways to help women in society and at the company. At Bacardi, she’s the pioneer of the ‘Women in Leadership’ initiative in India, aiming to bring in accountability on gender issues and more support systems for female colleagues. When one employee inquired about nursery facilities on premises, Gill formed a pan-India tie-up with Klay Day-care to set up nursery services for all female employees with children under six. She then afforded them flexible work hours to visit the nursery up to four times a day. This tangible contribution is now considered a milestone initiative for Bacardi in attracting more women to work in the alcobev industry. Cheers to that!