From the warung door to a regional brand plan

My mother ran a drinks stall in a hawker centre in Bedok, and she kept her prices in coins her customers already had in their pockets. When sugar went up she did not make the cup smaller. She raised the price by ten cents and chalked the new figure on the board where everyone could see it. I did not understand until much later that she had been running a pricing policy. I have been trying to persuade large companies to follow it ever since.

I studied business at Senggarang University in Singapore and graduated in 1998 with a marketing major, in the middle of the Asian financial crisis. The advertising jobs I had hoped for had disappeared, and I joined Haverlyn Department Stores as an assistant buyer in cosmetics and fragrance. For two and a half years I counted counter sales, negotiated gift-with-purchase stock with brand representatives and noticed which promises a beauty adviser could repeat with a straight face. I learnt that a claim is not finished when the agency approves it. It is finished when a tired saleswoman explains it to a doubtful customer at eight in the evening.

In January 2001 Velmaine, a fictional Dutch household and personal-care group, took me into its regional sales programme and sent me to Surabaya as an area sales manager for general trade in East Java. I managed eleven distributors and nine salespeople serving about 38,000 small shops, and I spent most mornings in the passenger seat of a distributor's van. That is where I learnt Bahasa Indonesia properly, and where I learnt how a warung owner decides what to stock: by the coins in her customers' hands, the credit her distributor allows and the space on the string of sachets hanging by her door. I also learnt how often a head-office promotion made no sense by the time it reached a kampung outside Malang.

In 2005 Velmaine moved me into brand management in Jakarta, on its sachet shampoo. I was a saleswoman among marketers, and I was useful because I could explain why a promotion would fail before it was printed. Over five years I became senior brand manager, rebuilt the brand's price ladder from sachet to bottle and commissioned its first campaigns written by Indonesian writers rather than translated from English. In 2010 I moved to Velmaine's regional hub in Singapore as brand director for hair care across seven Southeast Asian markets. Regional work taught me the cost of a single global idea, and the larger cost of seven unconnected ones.

In October 2014 I left a multinational for a listed Philippine company. Bantaya Foods Corporation made corn snacks and powdered chocolate drinks, sold mostly through sari-sari stores, and its founding family wanted a marketer who understood small packs and distributors. As vice president of marketing in Pasig I led a team of about seventy, took the brands into Filipino-language advertising the company had once thought too informal, and learnt to plan for a market in which typhoons interrupt distribution every year. Reporting to a chief executive who could ask me about any province made me a more careful planner.

Lumarind's executive chairman asked me to join as chief marketing officer in April 2019. The company had grown from her father's hair oil into three regional brands, but its marketing was still briefed in Singapore in English, its sachet prices had been set by precedent, and its online sales were growing faster than anyone was checking what was said about our products. Since then I have argued for decisions that made our numbers smaller before they made them sounder: holding the Helaimas sachet's fill when costs rose, withdrawing a recyclability claim, pausing contracted livestreams and moving Embunsari's creative work to Jakarta. Colleagues who disagreed were often partly right: our chief financial officer about what the sachet decision would cost, and our head of e-commerce about what a pause would do to our marketplace rankings.

I lead 186 people in brand management, consumer insight, creative, commerce marketing, trade marketing and marketing compliance across six markets, with seven direct reports. I ask them to bring me the shopper's arithmetic before the brand's ambition, and to write every claim as if a regulator, a religious scholar and a sceptical aunt will read it on the same day. I present the brand plan and price architecture to our board each year, report to its Sustainability Committee on packaging and environmental claims, and since 2024 have reported to its Audit and Risk Committee on how we control what is said about our products in live selling.

Inside the industry I am known for three positions that cost money in the short run: that a sachet should not be the dearest way to buy a product, that a halal certificate is an assurance about process and not a benefit to advertise, and that a livestream is an advertisement whose claims must be approved in advance. I am now preparing for a different responsibility alongside my executive one: a single independent directorship, where I would ask another company the questions I have spent seven years answering at Lumarind.

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