Asia-Pacific Power List 2022: Aman Gupta, Boat

Aman Gupta

Co-founder and chief marketing officer
Boat
India  
New member

Since 2019, Indian consumer electronics brand Boat has been excelling at digital marketing, especially with the signing of cricket personalities as brand ambassadors before the Indian Premier League season. As part of this influencer push, fans received short videos featuring these ambassadors from social media channels such as YouTube. By leveraging the power of short videos, this campaign brought in 44.4 million impressions, a 16% increase in product interest, and 159% lift in brand interest, which eventually lowered its cost-per-click. Boat also thrives on organic word-of-mouth reach. 

In 2016, during a time where Apple and Samsung dominated global markets, Boat achieved a fifth global ranking in wearables in terms of shipment value and global market share, just below Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Samsung. 

Behind the triumphant story of this strong challenger brand is a creative marketing mind, Aman Gupta, the co-founder and CMO of Boat. Even though Boat has a market share of over 48%, he believes that the secret to success is not about beating the competition but about coexistence. He has been quoted to say: "We believe in earning money and not burning money.” 

The Indian brand’s most recent collaboration with Warner Bros, released in June 2022, features Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, which Gupta said would be appreciated by its ‘Boathead’ community. This collaboration was created to boost its D2C strategy to connect in a more personalised way with consumers. 

Last February, Boat launched an ad campaign called Rock’In India, transforming its own social media platform as a launchpad, and emphasising that all their products are made in India. The brand partnered with Digitas to run the campaign; the agency also strengthened Boat’s brand presence on Twitter. In 2021, according to Campaign Asia-Pacific’s Top 1000 Brands, Boat was the number-two headphone and audio brand in India.

Prior to this role, Gupta worked for Citi and KPMG and has had nearly two years of experience working for Harman International as sales head for lifestyle brands JBL, Harman Kardon, and AKG for the Indian market.

Gupta can be found on Twitter at @amangupta0303.