Featuring: Paramjit Singh Gill, CEO, Consumer Division, Globus Spirits
Host: Nikhil Chaudhary, VP Marketing at BeatRoute
There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from having been on every side of a market. Having led from a position of dominance, having fought from the middle as a challenger, and now building something from a blank canvas. Paramjit Singh Gill has occupied all three positions across a career spanning over three decades in the Indian AlcoBev industry.
In this episode of The BeatRoute Podcast, he speaks with Nikhil Chaudhary about what that arc has revealed: about the Indian consumer’s rapid evolution, the mechanics of premiumization beyond metros, the underappreciated power of last-mile visibility, and why technology in AlcoBev has been less an adoption problem and more about unlocking the right mindset.
Paramjit Singh Gill currently is the CEO- Consumer Division at Globus Spirits, one of India’s largest and most influential spirits companies, home to a fast-rising premium portfolio that includes DŌAAB, Terai, Snoski, and Seventh Heaven Blue, brands that are earning genuine market recognition and increasingly punching at the very top of the industry.
The Consumer Didn’t Gradually Evolve. They Shifted.
If there’s a single thread running through everything Paramjit Singh Gill says, it’s this: the Indian consumer has fundamentally changed, and most of the industry is still catching up to just how completely.
A generation ago, aspirational consumption in India was anchored to legacy. You dreamed of the brands your parents considered premium. You saved for the labels that came with decades of advertising behind them. Switching required a reason. Loyalty was the default.
Today’s consumer is experimental by instinct. They are proud of their own tastes. They share opinions positive and negative publicly and without hesitation. And critically, they are not confined to the cities where trends used to originate. The social media feed of someone in a Tier 4 town and someone in South Mumbai is effectively the same. The trends land at the same time. The appetite to try something new, to move toward something better, exists across geographies with a uniformity that simply didn’t exist before.
He adds that in fact, the smaller the town, the higher the proportion of time an individual spends on digital platforms because there are fewer competing avenues for entertainment and aspiration. Which means, paradoxically, that the consumer in a Tier 3 city may be more deeply influenced by premium product narratives than someone in a metro who has twenty other stimuli competing for attention.
“Those days are gone when something succeeded in Delhi and Mumbai and it would succeed everywhere two years later. People in smaller towns are online, ordering literally everything now. They are ready to accept new things — it’s up to entrepreneurs and organizations how soon they can reach them, vet their appetite, and feed their requirements.”
From Protecting What Exists to Building What’s Next
When asked what it actually feels like to go from running an established business to building one from scratch, Paramjit Singh Gill describes it as the most enriching, yet most demanding phase of his career. Recalling his past role he said that each phase demanded a completely different version of him as a leader.
At USL, the strength was in brand muscle and route to market. Distribution was fast, wide, and national reach was almost overnight.
As a challenger, the priority shifted to premiumization, building a leaner, more profitable portfolio at a time when the market was already moving that way.
At Globus, the canvas is blank. No legacy baggage, no processes slowing things down, just the freedom to be nimble and experiment.
But there’s a humbling dimension to it too, he says. When you start from scratch, your past accomplishments don’t transfer as currency. You are, in a real sense, a newcomer. The team you’re assembling arrives from different companies, different cultures, different ways of working, and the task of building a shared culture, a shared understanding of what matters and what doesn’t, falls entirely to you.
“You are creating a culture from scratch. And when you do that, the real learning is, what do I imbibe from previous cultures, and what do I set for the one going forward? It becomes a new, evolved culture. One that doesn’t marry any single previous learning, but carries a combination of all of them, and the requirement of the moment.”
Premium Brands Is No Longer a Metro Story
The received wisdom used to be that premium brands belonged to metro markets. That luxury was a Tier 1 conversation. That aspirational consumption in smaller cities would follow, eventually, a few years behind.
Sharing the other side of the coin Paramjit Singh Gill says that the market itself has already disproved it.
Globus is actively pushing luxury brands into Tier 3 geographies, and the results have been, in his words, genuinely surprising.
The disposable income is there. The appetite is there. What consumers in these markets don’t want to do is travel to fetch premium experiences. They want access where they are.
This pattern is playing out across categories simultaneously. Luxury car showrooms, premium watch brands, high-end fashion labels, all are opening in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The infrastructure of premium consumption is moving outward, and AlcoBev is part of that wave.
Availability Gets You In. Visibility Keeps You There
In AlcoBev, traditional advertising is largely off the table. The shelf, the counter, and the outlet display are where brands get built or forgotten. When asked what separates brands that excel at this from those that don’t, Paramjit Singh Gill says it starts with availability. If you are not on the shelf, nothing else matters. Visibility comes next, and that is where the real fight is.
Some brands pay for it. Others rely on relationships. But what it truly comes down to is whether the team believes in it, and whether senior leaders are walking the market themselves or only talking about it in meetings. When seniors lead from the front, the team follows.
The consumer behavior rationale reinforces this. AlcoBev buyers don’t typically walk into an outlet with a single brand decision made. They carry a mental basket of four to six brands they’re open to. Every brand’s goal is to remain in that basket, and at the final moment of purchase, visibility is often what determines which basket item gets picked.
“Jo dikta hai, wo bikta hai. If you are visible, you have a better probability at the last mile. Visibility’s actual weightage is much more than people believe it is.”
Technology Has to Come in on Day Zero
When asked how early technology should come into the picture during a state expansion, Paramjit Singh Gill puts it simply: day zero. A new state, he says, is essentially a new business.
The biggest challenge when entering a new state is not the market. It is the team. You are bringing together people from different companies, different work cultures, and different mindsets. Training and interaction help, but technology does something they cannot. It gives the team a framework from the very start. It tells them what the organisation expects, what the boundaries are, and what good looks like in practice. People align faster when it is part of their daily tools from day one.
He is candid that this does not always happen perfectly. In the rush of a new expansion, technology sometimes gets introduced a little later than it should. But he is clear that is an operational shortcoming, not a change in principle.
“Tech is a day-one partner. If I can even say it’s a day-zero partner, that’s where it must start. When we lag, it’s our operational shortcoming. But as a principle, tech is a day zero.”
The Data Gap at the Last Mile
Talking about adoption of AI in AlcoBev, Paramjit says that, without a rich harvesting base of data, technology is not going to help you. AI or analytical.
Most AlcoBev companies are collecting frontline data like outlet visits, secondary sales, and distributor stock levels. But what gets captured is enough to spot broad trends, not enough to power prediction or semi-automation.
The regulatory environment makes this harder. India’s state-level structure creates three very different data realities for brands trying to build data-led operations:
- Some states share data freely, even across competitors, enabling benchmarking at a level playing field
- Some states allow brands to access only their own data
- Some states make even that difficult to get in structured form
The fragmentation is real. And it limits what AI can do.
💡Liquor brands chase disconnected data coming from corporation reports, distributor sheets, handwritten depot notes, and screenshots from field teams. Since it comes in non-standard, unstructured formats, sales planning and execution happens on partial intelligence.
BeatRoute’s Data Mapping AI Agent ingests PDFs, Excel files, and handwritten notes, and converts them into clean, outlet-level sales intelligence — mapped to the right retailers and partners.
No manual cleanup. No data team required. An AI that solves the alcobev industry’s data problem.
Visual Merchandising AI: Where It Works, and Where It Doesn’t
When asked about AI for visual audits like shelf compliance, eye-level placement, and cooler visibility, Gill acknowledged the technology is not new. “Our industry has been using it for more than a decade.”
But he was precise about where it creates value.
If a brand is investing in the outlet, creating the shop-in-shop, choosing the shelf height, the angle, the right side, then AI-based visibility auditing protects that investment. The science around eye movement and shelf grids is well established, and AI can score compliance against it.
But for brands whose visibility depends primarily on rep relationships rather than owned shelf space, Gill puts it plainly: “The best that you can get is what the relationship gives you.” In those cases, AI audit scores don’t add proportionate value.
The technology works. The ROI depends on how much you control the shelf.
💡 How BeatRoute solves this: VM Audit AI Agent Traditional VM audit tools required training on large libraries of existing shelf images, slow to set up and brittle every time planograms changed or new SKUs launched. BeatRoute’s VM Audit AI Agent is built on next-generation generative AI. No pre-trained image datasets. A rep captures a shelf photo on mobile.
The agent scores planogram adherence, cooler compliance, POSM placement, and shelf share, instantly. 95% accuracy. Deployable and tweakable in minutes, no retraining required when standards change. For brands investing in owned shelf space, this closes the loop between the investment and verifiable execution.
The Road Ahead
Paramjit Singh Gill’s outlook on the next five to seven years for the Indian AlcoBev industry is straightforwardly optimistic, not in a promotional way, but in the way of someone who has watched a long-term trend line and knows which direction it’s moving.
Indian entrepreneur companies are getting stronger. Indian brands, single malts, gins, flavored spirits, are earning respect in global markets that once didn’t take them seriously. The consumer is evolving, and companies that evolve with the consumer faster than their competitors will compound that advantage significantly. On a level playing field, he is confident that Indian companies hold their own and then some.
His parting thought to leaders preparing their organizations for what’s coming is characteristically direct: walk the road. Get out of offices and into markets. Talk to trade partners, to consumers, to frontline team members. The problems worth solving and the ideas worth pursuing reveal themselves on the ground far more reliably than they do in dashboards or strategy decks. And when something doesn’t work, which it won’t sometimes, accept that as par for the course and adjust. Not every arrow hits the target. The willingness to keep shooting is what separates the builders from the rest.
Acerca de BeatRoute
BeatRoute is a goal-driven AI platform for retail brands. It is an enterprise-grade, functionally scalable platform that uses a unique goal-driven mechanism with AI at its heart to deliver measurable business impact for brands in their retail sales and distribution channels.
Worldwide, retail brands from industries such as FMCG, consumer goods, AlcoBev, and building materials face the difficult choice of risky and high-capex implementation projects on development platforms. BeatRoute solves this global problem with a ready-to-deploy SaaS solution.
BeatRoute currently serves 200+ enterprise brands in 20+ countries, with 100K+ users across India, South Asia, and Africa in 10 industry verticals.
