See the six shortlisted nominees for WFA Global Marketer of the Year
The shortlisted candidates for this year’s WFA Global Marketer of the Year talk about their roles in a new series of videos from the WFA. Voting closes on the 31st of January.
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Global marketing leaders from Burger King, Diageo, Grab, Johnson & Johnson, L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble also reveal which achievements they are most proud from the past year.
Cheryl Goh, Group VP of Marketing & Founding CMO at Grab, started in as a one-woman marketing team, and has spent the last six years setting up the company’s marketing practise across Southeast Asia. She oversees Grab’s marketing efforts across the region, leading a team of over 500 marketers and helping to stretch the brand and become a super-app.
She revealed how the team is trained to interpret P&Ls to help them understand how they can contribute to growth as well as the impact that Grab for Good has had, notably enabling the company to onboard about 1,000 drivers with disabilities.
“There’s a lot of skills that marketers have that can be applied to other parts of the business. We have MDs, CEOs at country level whose background is pure marketing and I think that’s where we should be headed,” she says.
Fernando Machado, Chief Marketing Officer at Burger King, has won more than 120 Lions at Cannes and is known for pushing the creative boundaries to drive business growth.
“Diversity will help us become more creative because we are not sourcing the ideas from the same background and the same paradigms but also it will help us better reflect our consumer and help us come up with even more sense for those segments that are important for us,” he says.
He also talked about the importance of developing your own strong creative criteria and knowing how to influence big, complex organisations. His own approach was to align with the CEO, CFO and regional counterparts and then translate that in bitesize chunks.
Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal, has helped turn the world’s number one beauty company into a digital-first company, with a strong push on e-commerce.
The company’s upskilling efforts have seen 32,500 people and counting trained on digital and developed a cross-career path, allowing people coming from a traditional L’Oréal environment to take on digital jobs and people from digital backgrounds taking on marketing and GM roles.
“One of the big changes I can see for myself and the industry is really embracing this movement of tech for good. I really believe we are at the tipping point in terms of technology becoming an essential force into companies and into marketing and transformation in general and we can clearly see there are many very important questions that are on the table,” she says.
Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, has helped build the company’s multi-billion-dollar media, marketing and advertising strategies, and leads marketing innovations that guide communication and brand building for P&G’s portfolio of trusted, quality brands.
He says that a big part of the job is setting P&G people free to do great things, taking advantage of everyone’s immense creativity and capabilities.
“Giving them the freedom, the tools and the opportunity to create big ideas at a local level is where you are going to get the best work,” he says. “What I’m most pleased with and most proud of is the fact that our brands are really embracing that they can be a force for good and a force for growth and they can make a difference in how people see the world.”
Richa Goswami, Senior Director, Office of Marketing Value, Global Digital and Technology Excellence for J&J Consumer Health, has orchestrated wide scale transformation of traditional business practices into digital models and lead organizational change.
That includes the launch of J&J Launchpad, attracting 169 entries, enabling J&J to take advantage of some great capabilities, including testing AI in the creative space this year.
“If you believe what you are doing is the right thing for the consumer, great things will happen. Don’t worry about the accolades just do what you believe in your heart is the right thing to do. It will be challenging and there will be failure but anything worth doing is worth doing well,” she says.
Syl Saller, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer at Diageo, oversees all Global Marketing, Design, Innovation and Reserve – Diageo’s luxury division worldwide and is a leading advocate for gender equality issues, encouraging both better representation in creative but also supporting women who want to come back to work.
Success, she says, is down to people and teamwork and that’s the number one priority, notably in leadership development and marketing technical skills. A new leadership programme will “help people find their personal purpose and how that connects to the company purpose because we think that’s a huge accelerator of people’s growth and company growth."
People can still vote for their favourite here until the 31st of January.