MARKETING DIFFERENCE

1. 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:

• Qualitative Chapter for Product Researchers to enable fostering of new tools & techniques to effectively conduct Qualitative Research
• Ethnic Diversity group to foster networking among professionals of ethnic background to connect , build capability & celebrate culture.

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:

• to understand your target consumer completely who, what & how he/she behaves and what the needs are.
•  develop and test products appropriately in the environment and behaviour the products are used and
• most importantly it can allow marketers to reach and communicate with more consumers in a targeted way.

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:  

• the effort involved in getting organizations embracing and implementing diversity in totality vs. just written policies:
•  to get enough critical mass from organization who are passionate, believe and are ready to lead & contribute even small towards influencing and helping organizations to embrace diversity vs. perceiving this effort to be more self-benefit driven among those who lead.

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
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