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Friday, 22nd September 2023
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MARKETING DIFFERENCE1. What is your role at Procter & Gamble? Currently at Procter I work as Senior Technical Product & Consumer Research Manager, based in London. My role is to lead Global or Regional Research Projects for a product or category with an overarching vision to improve consumer's life via innovative and meaningful product solutions. The scope is to lead the R&D team and work with multifunctional team members to develop and support product development. We plan to reach more consumers, with either new or existing products along with convincing benefits & claims. As a leader, my role is to provide strategic direction, coach and guide teams to deliver the complete product qualification cycle. We start with idea generation, Idea inception, and move to prototype development, leads formulation /design identification. We then move to consumer and product test qualification and finally provide full technical support to all In-market communication & commercialization plans. Essentially, I get involved in the full product cycle, and it is very exciting. Apart from the above business contribution, I passionately lead two groups on the P&G UK site:
2. How does diversity help with customer marketing and product development? I believe understanding, valuing and leveraging diversity in-total and applying it to all aspects of marketing and product development can lead to significant business success. Embracing it fully will help you to step back, think differently, apply to understand the environment & the context before applying usual best practices. The company that adapts the principles quickly into its work processes, people development and in execution can see success. Having an open mind is key to leverage diversity in product development & marketing:
3. What are the joys and challenges of championing diversity in such a large organisation? Championing Diversity in a large organization is definitely not easy, its hard work and it starts with passion. Success is all about getting right advocates, supporters & leaders who walk the talk or role model diversity across all angles of organizations. It is quite satisfying and fruitful to see even if small baby steps are taken in the right direction. Challenges other than hard work are:
4. You have lived and worked in many countries. How have you adapted to these different environments? Overall for me moving and living in different countries has been a positive and life changing experience. One of the things the move has taught me is to have an open mind & be curious. This has allowed me to learn a lot, adapt from different cultures, has given me confidence and made me fearless of many things. Overall this journey has allowed me to become a ‘World citizen' that is ready to explore multi-faceted faces of this world - learn, uncover what is seen on face vs. what is hidden behind. How the same thing can be perceived differently by different cultures. How each individual needs to adapt, educate others on each others needs and raise awareness of even small subtle differences. Diversity is fun, and leads to personal growth and development - ingoring it is a loss!
Article added on 27th February 2010 at 1:10pm |