Apple has appointed Karishma Malpani as Partner Communications Manager, a move she disclosed via a LinkedIn update. This step brings an experienced marketer—most recently with boAt and earlier with Samsung India—into a role focused on partner-led communications and campaigns.
Karishma Malpani has joined Apple as Partner Communications Manager, and the appointment became public after she shared the career move on LinkedIn. In her post, she wrote, “New Year. New Beginning. Apple,” signalling a fresh chapter at the start of 2026.
The change also reflects a broader pattern in India’s consumer-tech marketing talent pool: leaders who have worked across OEMs, fast-moving D2C brands, and agencies are increasingly being tapped for roles that sit at the intersection of brand, partners, and go-to-market execution. In Apple’s case, “partner communications” typically means ensuring the brand shows up consistently wherever customers encounter it—especially through indirect channels where retailers, carriers, marketplaces, and other partners play a major role in awareness and purchase decisions.
Because partner marketing often involves many stakeholders and strict brand requirements, the work demands an operator’s mindset: balancing speed and scale with consistency, coordinating multiple approvals, and translating central brand standards into local, partner-ready execution. That combination of structure and creativity is often easiest for professionals who have worked on both brand-side and agency-side environments, where timelines are tight and cross-functional alignment is constant.
A Partner Communications Manager role at Apple is often oriented around coordinating launches and campaigns that appear inside partner environments, including retailer advertising, digital placements, and in-store communication touchpoints. It can also involve working closely with external partners to build campaigns—shaping briefs, giving creative feedback, managing timelines, and navigating internal reviews and approvals.
In addition, the role can require representing partner needs internally across teams such as partner marketing, channel, advertising, and sales, so that partner-led execution stays aligned with business priorities and brand standards. Apple’s Partner Communications roles also commonly emphasise strong relationship-building with partners, experience in brand communications across ATL and BTL, and an ability to execute “best-in-class” marketing with external stakeholders.
At a practical level, partner communications sits between strategy and execution. Strategy clarifies what should be communicated, to whom, and why; execution ensures the idea is delivered in the right formats, on the right timelines, with the right guardrails. This is where strong marketing professionals add disproportionate value: they reduce friction for partners, preserve the brand’s creative and message integrity, and help campaigns land with clarity in real-world environments that are rarely as controlled as a brand’s owned channels.
Another reason the function is important is because partner environments are where many customers make the final decision. Even when demand is created through brand advertising, the last mile—retail discovery, product comparisons, offers, plan bundles, and salesperson influence—often happens within partner ecosystems. When partner communication is done well, it feels seamless: the customer gets the same promise, the same visual language, and the same product truth, regardless of whether they are browsing a marketplace, walking into a retail store, or exploring a carrier plan.
Before joining Apple, Malpani served as Head of Product Marketing at boAt Lifestyle, where she led product marketing initiatives during a short stint. Prior to boAt, she spent over three years at Samsung India, working on marketing for flagship and foldable smartphone portfolios.
This combination—fast-scaling consumer audio and lifestyle technology on one side, and premium smartphone innovation on the other—maps well to partner communications work. Premium categories are high-consideration, where customers ask more questions and compare more options; fast-moving lifestyle categories are high-frequency, where momentum, speed, and cultural relevance can make or break visibility. Both types of experience can sharpen a marketer’s ability to create narratives that hold attention while still communicating functional value.
Earlier in her career, Malpani also held the role of Deputy Manager – Brand, Media and Content Marketing at Morris Garages India, contributing across brand and media strategy. She also spent nearly three years at WPP Media, serving as Business Manager and later Business Group Head.
That agency experience is especially relevant for partner-facing roles because agencies typically train marketers to manage complexity: multiple deliverables, multi-platform planning, and constant coordination among creative, media, and client stakeholders. It also builds a strong sense of measurement discipline—knowing which messages and channels are doing the work, which optimisations matter, and how to refine creative without losing the core brand idea.
Across these roles, her work has spanned consumer technology, automotive, and agency-side responsibilities, touching product marketing, brand communication, and media planning. The throughline is breadth: experience that covers what’s being marketed (products), how it’s expressed (brand communication), and where it reaches people (media and partner channels).
From Apple’s perspective, a partner communications appointment is rarely just about publishing assets; it’s about creating consistency across a wide and diverse channel mix, while still enabling partners to do what they do best—sell, bundle, demonstrate, and distribute at scale. Partner campaigns involve real constraints: space limitations in stores, varied digital specs, different promotional calendars, and different levels of creative maturity across partner organisations. The job becomes part brand guardian and part growth operator.
Malpani’s background in flagship and foldable smartphone marketing at Samsung India could be particularly useful in navigating premium storytelling in a crowded market, where differentiation is subtle and messaging must remain crisp. Her more recent product marketing leadership at boAt can also be an asset in understanding how younger audiences respond to narrative, creator ecosystems, and sharper cultural timing—skills that increasingly influence how consumer-tech brands show up, even in premium segments.
For channel partners, a strong partner communications leader can improve both speed and quality. When the role is executed well, partners receive clearer briefs, faster feedback, and more effective toolkits that help them market products accurately while still meeting their commercial objectives. That creates a better experience for customers too, because it reduces confusion at the point of discovery—fewer mismatched claims, fewer inconsistent visuals, and fewer unclear comparisons.
Over time, partner communications can also shape how a brand’s launches are perceived. Launch moments matter disproportionately: they set the early narrative, influence reviews and early adopters, and signal what the product stands for. In partner channels, the “launch moment” is not only a keynote or a press release—it is also the first week of retail visibility, the first set of partner homepages and banners, the first carrier plan creatives, and the first in-store demonstration prompts. Coordinating that ecosystem requires disciplined planning and strong stakeholder management.
For India’s marketing industry, this is also another example of cross-category talent mobility—where professionals build credibility in one sector (smartphones), sharpen a different edge in another (wearables/lifestyle tech), and then move into a global brand environment that requires both scale thinking and detail obsession. Apple’s marketing standards are widely known to be exacting; partner communication roles must uphold that bar while still being practical and partner-friendly.