Nikhil Soni named head of brand and marketing at HCL Group

GREATER DELHI: Few marketers can say they have sold both a sitar recital and a seat in a lecture hall. Nikhil Soni can. In July 2026, the man who made HCL Concerts India’s largest classical music platform became head of brand and marketing at HCL Group, with a mandate that now stretches across brand, sports, culture, learning and environment.

It is a promotion built on numbers. Over 12 years across higher education and media and entertainment, Soni has married storytelling to data, and the results show. At HCL Concerts, which he has worked on since 2015, the platform grew from two cities to ten. It now stages more than 20 concerts and over 60 digital streams a year, drawing more than 30,000 live attendees and over 1.2m online viewers. Over a decade, it delivered three times its advertising value equivalent and captured a 35 per cent share of voice.

The digital playbook was just as busy. Baithak reached 220m people. Carnatic Quest drew 10,000 participants. Raaga Collective added 8,000 followers in two months. The Great Indian Classical Podcast clocked 12m streams. Soni also led product go-to-market and growth for the HCL Music app, which has notched up more than 200,000 installs, a 4.2-star rating, over 2,000 daily active users and 35 per cent four-week retention.

The second act is on campus. Since 2020, Soni has run performance marketing and demand generation at Shiv Nadar University Chennai, orchestrating campaigns across search, social, programmatic, affiliate, native, print, television and outdoor. Admissions revenue grew 140 per cent across five cycles. Over six years, impressions rose sixfold, engagement 11-fold, landing page visits sevenfold, leads fourfold and applications threefold.

The climb at HCL has been steady. Soni joined in August 2015 as manager, marketing, and rose through senior manager and group manager to assistant general manager, covering brand, growth and product go-to-market. His journey began earlier still. He started as a software engineer at HCLTech, serving a Fortune 100 client, then moved through banking and consulting at Citibank India, Hexagon Consulting and Francorp Advisors, where he worked on go-to-market planning, partnerships and franchise development. At Sharda Group, as team lead for admissions marketing and strategy, he ran lead generation across pay-per-click, search engine optimisation and education portals, contributed to projects for the chairman’s office and supported an ERP rollout with HCL and KPMG.

The peer verdict is positive. Soni is recognised among India’s Top 100 Digital Marketers by Paul Writer and Adobe Digi100. His focus stays on customer acquisition cost, conversion, retention and long-term brand equity.

In his own words, he is looking forward to building on what has already been created and shaping the next chapter of the HCL Group brand. With creativity, performance and now a broader canvas in one pair of hands, that chapter promises to be worth reading.