Fatema Dewji, the director of Marketing at the Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited (MeTL) Group.
Fatema, a young leader with multi-professional experiences, is quite inspirational.
Wearing
a black headscarf, she welcomed us smiling broadly. Her black outfit -
complemented by the grey top and black high heels - made her look even
more elegant. Salome Gregory is talking about Fatema Dewji, the director
of Marketing at the Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited (MeTL) Group.
She is an author who has published two books, TEDx Speaker, founder of
Educate, Empower & Inspire, aims at putting successful women in the
spotlight - and for others to do the same. Fatema shares her personal
career journey so as to inspire other women. Read on...
Please briefly tell us about your career story
I
graduated from the University of Georgetown in Finance and Management.
The university is renown for politics. I said to myself that, when I am
done, I will go and study Politics before I go for a Masters’ Programme.
I came back and worked for one year - and I got bored with doing
Finance because it was a desk job. So, I started looking at what was
happening with CEOs, started looking at distribution and I was talking
to people in the Marketing industry. I realised that, basically, not
many people knew about our products. People were not asking for our
products. There was no brand awareness and this scared me because
multinationals like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola and others spend so much money
on creating a connection with consumers, which is important. I
challenged myself to do more market research on our products. The
department by then was just me and one designer. In 10 years, we have
grown our department significantly. I have 50 people working under me
in sales & marketing.
What are the challenges which you went through when establishing and running?
It
was very challenging. I went through a lot of failures - but from them I
learnt a lot. Thanks to my attitude of ‘I don’t know it all.’ So, I was
ready to learn from different people of the same industry who have been
here for more than 20 years and have worked for multinational
companies. Through that I was able to create a room for people to come
and teach me regardless my director title. It was learning through
humility which has helped me until today.
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