Shishir Mishra is the new Citroen brand head

Shishir Mishra – the director and head of sales and marketing synergy at Stellantis India has been moved to lead the Citroen brand.

Mishra’s appointment as the brand head is part of the company's plans to revamp the management structure and offer sharper focus to individual brands.

Late last month, Stellantis India brought in Priyesh Kumar as the Jeep brand head, which Autocar Professional had exclusively reported on 29 January. We had also reported that the announcement for the new brand head for Citroen will be made in February. 

Mishra has been steering the role of bringing in synergies in sales and marketing for both Jeep and Citroen brands at Stellantis India since June 2022 given the modest network and lower volumes throughput to create a viable business model.

He is amongst the oldest employees of the Citroen brand in the country and was onboarded in June 2018 as a director and head of partnerships.

Before Citroen India – Mishra was associated with multiple non-banking financial corporations attached to the automotive companies - Toyota Financial Services, Ford Credit for over a decade.

An email sent to Stellantis India did not elicit any response till the time of publishing.

Over the last 18 months, the company brought in Aditya Jairaj to lead the operations as the MD and now it has put in place two new brand directors to steer the future growth endeavours.

While Priyesh Kumar would seek to build the Jeep brand with the existing portfolio of Compass, Meridian, Mishra does have a fresh vehicle portfolio of C3, C3 AirCross which has had a sub-optimal performance so far.

Amongst the last entrants in the market, Citroen has struggled to cross the 1000 units per month sales mark, despite playing in the mainstream Rs 8 lakh to Rs 20 lakh segment.

Mishra who understands the workings of the group well having worked in delivering synergies across brands over the last few years - will have to infuse fresh life in its portfolio.

"I look forward to leverage Citroën's rich heritage and innovative spirit to strengthen our position in the Indian market, working closely with our dealer partners to deliver exceptional experiences to our customers and drive sustainable growth for the company," Mishra stated. 

Stellantis India has taken a slew of measures – right from launching the new automatic version of C3 AirCross SUV, recalibrated its feature sets and pricing and even made six airbags as mandatory to fulfill the demanding Indian consumers' demand for safer cars.

The company in fact deferred the launch of its 3rd vehicle under its C-Cube project - codenamed – CC22 devised for the mainstream market to get the product specs right and also get its spread or distribution in place to ensure the volumes are respectable enough.