Bloomingdale PR appoints Parikshit Sharma as Southeast Asia regional director

SINGAPORE: Bloomingdale Public Relations has just made a hire that says as much about where the PR industry is heading as it does about the firm itself. Parikshit Sharma joins as regional director for Southeast Asia, based out of Singapore, tasked with leading the firm’s headquarters there and driving growth across the region, including the increasingly important India-Singapore business corridor. What makes the appointment notable is not the title. It is the fact that Sharma has spent his entire career outside traditional PR, and Bloomingdale picked him precisely because of that.

The logic behind the hire is worth sitting with. Diana Fernandes, founder and group chief executive of Bloomingdale, said the firm deliberately looked beyond conventional PR backgrounds because communications has changed dramatically, now sitting at the intersection of business, culture, technology, consumer behaviour and reputation. That is not boilerplate justification. Sharma’s CV backs it up in full: more than 20 years across marketing, brand activation, experiential strategy and consumer engagement, with senior stints at DDB Mudra, Ogilvy Action, Wunderman Thompson and Havas Media Group, spanning Asia, Africa and Australia. Since 2018 he has been based in Singapore advising ASEAN and Australian brands on retail, activation and digital engagement, including relaunch work for Intel and Nokia.

The track record has substance behind it too. At Wunderman Thompson, Sharma led a festival shopper campaign spanning ten Tata retail brands including Tanishq, Titan, Croma and Westside. At Ogilvy Action, he ran rural activation for Hindustan Unilever that reached more than four million households. His shopper marketing work at DDB Mudra picked up Gold and Silver at the Abby Awards. That is a résumé built on consumer behaviour and brand building at scale, not press releases and media lists, and it is exactly the kind of experience Bloomingdale is betting will differentiate its Southeast Asia practice.

Fernandes’ framing of Singapore itself is equally telling. She described it not as simply another market Bloomingdale operates in, but as a vantage point into Southeast Asia, a hub that allows the firm to build relationships with the region’s brands, media and decision-makers from within the ecosystem rather than from outside it. That ambition requires a leader who can think regionally rather than market by market, and Sharma’s own comment leaned directly into that challenge. He noted that Southeast Asia is not one market but a patchwork of distinct media landscapes, consumer behaviours, business cultures and regulatory environments, and framed his mandate as building a regional practice that understands those differences rather than flattening them.

Sharma’s brief is specific and commercially sharp: build Bloomingdale’s Singapore client base, deepen capabilities across Southeast Asian markets, and lead the India-Singapore corridor strategy, working with Indian brands expanding eastward as well as international businesses looking to enter or strengthen their presence in India. That corridor focus matters. As Indian companies increasingly look to Southeast Asia for growth and international brands continue eyeing India as an entry market, a communications partner fluent in both directions has real commercial value, and Bloomingdale is positioning itself to own that lane.

For a firm that already advises more than 40 brands across twelve sectors, including listed companies, this hire signals ambition beyond incremental growth. Bloomingdale is betting that the next generation of PR leadership will not come from newsroom relationships alone, but from executives who have actually built brands, understood consumers and navigated business strategy from the inside. If that bet pays off, Sharma’s appointment will look less like a single hire and more like the opening move in a broader repositioning of what PR leadership is supposed to look like.