Advisory Board Member Ashish Babu at the head office of Tata Consultancy Services in Amsterdam.
Ashish Babu has built a career at the intersection of reputation, growth and transformation. With over 25 years in communications and marketing, he’s now bringing that experience to consultancy Linq Advisors — and, when it comes to reputation, he’s not shy about what needs to change.
“The best thing we can do for reputation is to speak less like comms people and more like business leaders,” he says. “If we get the language right, we add value.”
Ashish’s day job is as chief marketing and communications officer for global markets at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the world’s largest tech businesses. But his professional roots go deep into India’s PR boom of the early 2000s, where he cut his teeth at the likes of Weber Shandwick, Hanmer MSL and Burson-Marsteller. That was before he went in-house at Tata Sky.
“It was a baptism of fire,” he recalls. “A joint venture between Tata and Sky – the commercial pressure was massive. But I loved it. Consumer marketing, crisis management, brand-building, stakeholder management – it all came together.”
When Ashish moved to TCS in 2008, he brought that same commercial intensity to the B2B world. He joined TCS HQ in Mumbai to support the corporate communications needs and eventually moved to the UK, where he faced a different challenge altogether. “In India, everyone knew who we were. In London, Tata our parent was better known. That reset forced a new kind of thinking: brand as licence to operate. Your reputation in each market is perceived differently. The trick is to be consistent, without being tone-deaf.”
Babu has known the founder of Linq Advisors, Dennis Larsen, for some time.
“We’ve always spoken about how reputation is underleveraged. It gets talked about when things go wrong. But what if it was baked into growth strategies from the start?”
That’s where he believes Linq can make a real impact — helping organisations define their value through proof points, not platitudes. “Customers need to see it, feel it. Reputation is what makes people want to work with you or buy from you. It builds goodwill which gives you room to move in a crisis, or to price with confidence.”
Now part of Linq’s consulting bench, Babu hopes to push the firm beyond its European heartland and into fast-growth regions. “There’s a huge opportunity in markets like India where brand-building and business development are still too siloed. If we can bring those together, that’s a real differentiator.”
His approach remains grounded in pragmatism. “Comms people are brilliant tacticians. Marketers can be wildly ambitious. But somewhere in the middle is where reputation lives – where strategy turns into impact.”