Which FMCG and consumer goods roles do you search for?

Leadership and mid-senior roles across the consumer value chain: heads of general trade and modern trade sales, e-commerce and quick commerce leads, marketing and brand heads, innovation and new product development leads, category and revenue management, supply chain and finance leaders, and general managers. Where a role is a niche specialist one, we bring in an operator from that niche to assess with us.

Can a leader from a large FMCG company succeed at a challenger brand?

Sometimes, and whether they do depends on operating temperament rather than on their CV. At a large company, structure did a great deal of the work. At a challenger there is often no field force, no distributor management system and no brand team. We ask about what they built rather than what they ran, and about how they worked when the support was not there.

Do you understand the difference between general trade and modern trade leadership?

Yes, first-hand. General trade leadership is distributor relationships, field force productivity and reach into towns the data does not cover well. Modern trade leadership is key account negotiation, terms, shelf and promotional calendars with a handful of large retailers. They attract different temperaments and reward different habits, and we brief and assess them as different roles.

Who does the assessing on a consumer goods search?

We run the leader brief, the stage brief and the fit conversations ourselves. For capability assessment we draw on a decade inside consumer businesses and, where the role calls for it, a senior operator from our network who has held that role: a former sales director for a general trade head, a former e-commerce lead for a marketplace role. They meet the shortlist, not just the file.

Do you work with promoter-led consumer companies as well as professionally managed ones?

Yes, and the distinction matters more than most briefs admit. In a promoter-led company the hire's compatibility with the promoter decides almost everything, and decisions move at the speed of a phone call. In a professionally managed company the hire has to work through a committee and a calendar. We put which kind of company this is into the brief and the candidate conversations.

What happens after the hire joins?

You receive a handover note on how to work well with the person: what motivates them, how they take feedback, what tends to disengage them. At the three-month mark we run a 90-day check-in with the hire and with the leader, separately. It runs alongside the three-month replacement guarantee and it is where early misreadings get corrected before they become a departure.

FMCG executive search in India

Why hire a consumer goods leader through a firm that has done the work?

A search firm that has sat inside consumer businesses can read an FMCG brief for what it leaves out, and most FMCG briefs leave out the things that decide whether the hire lasts.

The founder of The Corelation spent a decade inside consumer businesses, across general trade, modern trade, e-commerce and innovation, hiring into these roles and being hired into them. That matters less as a credential than as a way of reading. When a brief says "head of sales", we know to ask whether that means a distributor network to rebuild, a key account relationship to repair, or a quick commerce channel nobody has yet owned. Those are different jobs, filled by different people, and a job description rarely says which one it is.

Our authority comes from the business, not from recruiting process. Most boutique search firms are founded by recruiters, and their credibility sits in network, database and turnaround time. Ours sits in having seen what happens when a consumer leader is technically right and situationally wrong, and in having built a method to see it coming.

Which FMCG and consumer goods roles do we search for?

We search for the leadership and mid-senior roles that run a consumer business: sales across general trade, modern trade and e-commerce, marketing and brand, innovation, category, supply chain, finance and general management.

General trade sales leaders. Distributor relationships, field force productivity, reach into the towns and outlets the data does not cover well. The role rewards people who are comfortable on the road and good at keeping distributors loyal through a bad quarter.
Modern trade and key account leaders. Negotiating terms, shelf and promotional calendars with a small number of powerful retailers. The temperament is closer to a commercial negotiator than to a field general.
E-commerce and quick commerce leads. Marketplace P&L, assortment, content, availability and the economics of fast delivery. Often the first person in the company to own the channel properly rather than as a side task.
Innovation and new product development. Pipeline, consumer insight, the discipline to kill ideas, and the ability to work with R&D, supply chain and finance at once.
Marketing and brand heads, category and revenue management, supply chain, finance and general managers. The roles that hold a consumer business together, and the ones where the reporting relationship most often decides the outcome.

Can a large-company operator succeed at a challenger brand?

Sometimes, and whether they do depends on operating temperament rather than on the quality of their CV, because at a large company the structure did a great deal of the work that a challenger expects the person to do themselves.

A hypothetical. A regional sales head from a large listed consumer company joins a challenger food brand as its head of sales. At the previous employer, distributors were appointed by a process, the field force was managed through a system, and a bad month triggered a review by people whose job it was to run reviews. At the challenger, the distributor network is a list in a founder's phone, there is no system, and the bad month is the head of sales's problem alone. Some leaders find this exhilarating. Others, equally capable, find it exhausting and leave within the year, and the exit interview says culture. It was stage.

The reverse happens too. A leader who built a challenger's distribution from zero joins a large company and is undone by the number of people who have to agree before anything moves. Company stage is a skill: build from zero, or run what exists. It is not seniority, and it is rarely screened. We screen for it directly, by asking about what the person built rather than what they ran, and by giving candidates an honest account of what exists at the company and what does not.

The same title, in a large consumer company and at a challenger brand
What the role involves	Large consumer company	Challenger brand
Distribution	An established network, managed through a system and a team	Appointing distributors personally, often one town at a time
Data	Dashboards and an analytics team to read them	A spreadsheet the leader builds and maintains
Decisions	Committees, annual plans, a calendar	The founder, often that evening
What is rewarded	Delivering the plan inside the structure	Making something exist that did not
What derails the hire	Impatience with process	Waiting for support that is not coming

How do culture and compatibility show up in consumer companies?

In consumer businesses culture usually comes down to who decides and how fast, and compatibility comes down to whether the hire can work with the person who holds the brand in their head.

Many Indian consumer companies are promoter-led, and the promoter is often the brand's first marketer, first salesperson and first product developer. A head of marketing joining such a company is not taking over the brand. They are being trusted with it by someone who built it, and the terms of that trust are rarely written down. In the leader brief we ask the promoter directly: what will you always decide yourself, how do you want to be challenged, what did the last person in this seat get wrong. Candidates hear the answers. Some step back. The ones who step forward tend to stay.

In professionally managed consumer companies the pattern is different but no less decisive. The hire reports to a CXO who has their own way of running a function, and a committee that has its own way of saying no. A leader who thrives on speed will struggle; one who is good at building consensus will do well. Neither is better. The brief has to say which one this company needs.

How does The Corelation run an FMCG search?

We brief the hiring manager before we brief the market.

Before any sourcing we sit with the person the hire will report to and write a leader brief: decision style, what they delegate, how they like to be challenged, what a strong first few months looks like in their head. We write a stage brief: what exists in the function and what does not, how fast the company changes direction, who actually decides. We assess capability properly, with a senior operator from our network where the role needs one, and then we stop competing on it. Candidates are read against the leader and the stage, hear the honest version of the company, and the one you hire comes with a handover note and a 90-day check-in. Every step is set out on how we work, from the leader brief to the 90-day check-in.

Consumer goods is where our first-hand depth is deepest, and the same method runs across the categories next to it: retail, e-commerce and D2C, health and wellness, and Indian consumer brands going global. The full range of what we cover is on who we work with.

FMCG and consumer goods leadership search