Former Lexus exec Vinay Shahani to lead sales and marketing at Nissan North America

Nissan North America has poached Lexus marketing chief Vinay Shahani to help drive the top line in a slowing economy.

As senior vice president of U.S. marketing and sales, Shahani will oversee key businesses for the Nissan brand. He will also have oversight of Infiniti Americas.

Shahani, 49, replaces Michael Colleran, who retires March 31 after more than 12 years with Nissan.

Shahani takes over at a precarious time. Economic headwinds, including high interest rates and softening demand, are hurting throughput and dealer profitability.

At the end of last year, dealers said the average days' supply hovered around 80 days — significantly higher than the 45-day supply that Nissan executives committed to early last year. Meanwhile, nearly a third of the retail network was reportedly unprofitable.

Nissan National Dealer Advisory Board Chairman Tyler Slade said Shahani's "sales and marketing strength is exactly what we need right now."

At Lexus, Shahani led marketing for the luxury brand, including strategy, communications and media, product marketing, incentives and motorsports.

Before that, he was vice president of integrated marketing operations at Toyota North America. Shahani joined Toyota in 2017 from Volkswagen of America, where he served as senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

For Shahani, his latest gig is a homecoming.

Shahani worked at Nissan North America for a decade. He started his Nissan career as an engineering manager at the Smyrna Vehicle Assembly Plant in 2004 and quickly moved into a managerial role within the company's marketing and sales function. During his Nissan tenure, Shahani held roles in sales operations, after-sales, product marketing, field sales, and marketing communications and media.

Shahani, the son of a Ford Motor Co. engineer, earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Michigan, interning at Ford during summers. After a four-year stint in management consulting, he received an MBA from Stanford University.

Shahani was named an Automotive News Rising Star in 2015 while with Volkswagen.

Colleran, a retired U.S. Marine Corps captain, orchestrated a turnaround of Nissan's U.S. business at the start of the decade.

Under his watch, Nissan worked to mend frayed relations with dealers and transformed its product portfolio from one of the industry's stalest to one of its freshest. Colleran also steered Nissan's pivot away from a market share-driven sales strategy to one focused on profits.

Slade referred to Colleran, 62, as the "perfect executive" to steer the brand through the "uncertain times" of the pandemic.

"Mike has helped navigate Nissan through some serious challenges, including COVID and supply chain issues," Slade said. "He pushed and successfully moved Nissan away from brand-damaging volume-based sales programs and helped deliver record profits for dealers."

Colleran joined Nissan in 2011 as vice president of sales for Nissan Canada and then moved to oversee Nissan's Northeast region in the U.S. He has held leadership positions overseeing the Infiniti brand, first as group vice president for Infiniti Americas and then as global divisional vice president and vice chairman for Infiniti Motor Company, Ltd. He returned to the U.S. as senior vice president, U.S. marketing and sales in 2020, to implement the Nissan NEXT transformation.