MUMBAI: In the dog-eat-dog world of Indian streaming, few have climbed the corporate ladder with quite the same gusto as Kaveri Das. The business head of Zee5 Hindi has turned customer retention into an art form, wielding micro-cohort strategies like a digital Michelangelo.
Das’s journey reads like a clever roster in strategic positioning. After cutting her teeth as a software engineer at Mahindra Satyam back in 2006, she pivoted to the telco trenches at Idea Cellular, where she spent four years mastering the dark arts of customer lifecycle management. A brief stint at Tata Sky as senior manager of subscriber marketing followed, before she landed at Zee5 in 2015 – just as India’s streaming wars were heating up.
Her ascent at the Zee Entertainment subsidiary has been nothing short of spectacular. From customer lifecycle management head in 2015, Das clawed her way to corporate strategy lead by 2019, before a curious 18-month detour to Onnivation as vice-president of growth and strategy. But like a boomerang with ambition, she returned to Zee5 in late 2022 with grander titles and weightier responsibilities.
The timing couldn’t be more crucial. India’s over-the-top video market is experiencing growing pains, with players from Netflix to JioHotstar locked in an expensive game of content chicken. Das’s expertise in building “robust processes” and converting casual viewers into loyal subscribers could prove the difference between streaming success and digital oblivion.
Her latest promotion to Zee5 Hindi business head in April suggests the company is doubling down on her proven formula of strategic thinking meets operational excellence. In an industry where customer acquisition costs are soaring and attention spans are shrinking, Das appears to have cracked the code on keeping viewers hooked.
Not bad for someone who started her career debugging code rather than decoding consumer behaviour.
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