PROFILE
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Susanne Arfelt Rajamand, head of marketing for Unilever Singapore, has worn several different hats at Unilever – moving from global roles to regional ones before taking on her current role for Singapore. A Unilever stalwart, she started in the company as a management trainee before moving through various roles. She now oversees 40 brands for Unilever. Arfelt is in her second year in her current role in leading Unilever’s marketing for Singapore, and is a familiar face in the industry. Upon taking on her role, she has been active in pushing for change within the organisation. One of the first things she changed was the overall structure – creating a category structure for different product groups – ice-cream, skin cleansing and others. Another move she pushed for was to make a deep dive into consumer
The next biggest issue for Arfelt is managing a workforce. While she loves working with her local team, one issue with the local workforce is its low patience. “The expectations on both monetary and title progression is very high. Managing that has definitely been a whole new challenge to me because my previous management experience has been with a more international workforce, with people from Southeast Asia or Europe, where there is not as much mobility as with the other markets – there’s a lot more focus on learning.” Managing that expectation is one of her biggest challenges, she said. How does she do it then? Arfelt laughs and says: “For that you have to ask them. It’s not easy.”
“THERE IS A TENDENCY OF OVER PROMISING ON PITCHES AND IT JUST DOES NOT BRING ANYTHING GOOD BECAUSE IN THE END, IF YOU’RE IN IT FOR A LONG RUN AND IF YOU’VE BEEN A LITTLE TOO OPTIMISTIC, IT IS GOING TO TURN OUT NEGATIVELY.” analytics with the team’s media agency Mindshare to change how it made its media investments. This saw Unilever moving heavily into experiential marketing in Singapore. For example, the past few years saw Unilever execute several major experiential marketing moves, such as its Magnum Pleasure stores and events, Ben & Jerry’s Chunk Fest as well as scented out-of-home ads with SMRT for its Comfort Aromatherapy fabric conditioner. “We went from a heavy spend in traditional media (TV especially) to a more balanced spend with new platforms (digital) for certain brands, but there was little impact for others. Going ahead we are looking at less dramatic changes, but instead focus on further optimisation of current channel usage in line with where the consumers move their media consumption,” she says. While Unilever has been actively pushing into new digital, mobile marketing and e-commerce, Arfelt raises the issue of how difficult digital initiatives are to measure. Stakeholder management (buy-in) is a big issue in pushing for digital because of a lack of a consistent and reliable means of tracking. While measuring effectiveness (cost-per-click, etc) is possible; seeing how it measures up against competitors is not possible. “It’s really an auditing issue. We’ve really taken a significant leap into digital which I strongly feel is the right thing to do. But it also means that usual tracking that Unilever runs by is not in place to really cover and understand how we are spending the money,” Arfelt admits. “Justifying that is challenging in a market where you don’t have the similar analytics as you have in more traditional media.” It is more of an auditing issue, where it is hard to track what competitors are doing in the space, unlike in traditional media. “So there is definitely more of a challenge of arguing why we are going down that journey and if that is the right thing to do.”
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The next thing we talk about is her take on agency relations. Catch Arfelt in any conference or meeting and she’s always surrounded by agency executives looking to talk to her. What makes an agency stand out in a pitch, I ask. The answer is simple. “Firstly, try to understand my business and try to understand my business problem rather than coming in with a tailorcut pitch which in most cases they do. Secondly, they should come in with a clear point of view on how they can be different. What I find is most agencies just tell you what they have done,” she says. “And be honest there is a tendency of over promising on pitches and it just does not bring anything good because in the end, if you’re in it for a long run and if you’ve been a little too optimistic, it is going to turn out negatively.” That said, she describes herself as believing in long-term agency relations. In another interview on whether the idea of having agencies of record was still relevant, Arfelt argued: “Brands are like people, it takes time to get to know them. If we continuously change agencies, there will be little to no consistency in the look and feel of the communication. “Agency relationships take a long time to build and I believe the greatest work comes out once the client and agency have tried a couple of campaigns, learned how they can optimise and continuously improve through honest conversations.” She notes how her current PR agency GolinHarris impressed her on a pitch for Toni&Guy. “They spent a lot of resources listening to our consumers and brought a lot of great ideas to the table. That impressed me that they really tried to take the business challenge. “I believe very much in trusting and empowering other people.”
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