Jermina Menon, MRICS, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Knowetic, is a results-oriented and ROI-obsessed marketing professional with over 25 years of experience in retail and FMCG marketing. Her extensive expertise encompasses business strategy, brand marketing, and digital strategy, making her a formidable force in the marketing landscape.
Jermina’s career spans a wide array of marketing domains, including brand management, social media marketing, omnichannel and e-commerce marketing, CRM, and loyalty marketing. Her strategic acumen and hands-on approach have consistently delivered exceptional outcomes across these areas.
In her recently launched strategic consulting venture, Knowetic, Jermina focuses on assisting startups & SME entrepreneurs in re-engineering their businesses for maximum efficiency. She offers strategic marketing solutions that are not only innovative but also deliver tangible ROI. In the post-Covid world, she has been instrumental in helping clients digitize their customer journeys and sales funnels, achieving remarkable results with a 5x impact.
Jermina’s passion for marketing extends to helping young brands create and solidify their identities, ensuring they resonate with their target customers. Her strategic insights and dedication to delivering measurable results make her a trusted advisor for businesses looking to navigate the complexities of modern marketing.
With a career marked by significant achievements and a relentless drive for excellence, Jermina Menon continues to lead the way in strategic marketing, empowering businesses to thrive in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
Below are highlights of the interview:
What inspired you to join this company, and what has been your biggest challenge in leading it to where it is today?
I started Knowetic, a boutique strategic & retail marketing consultancy, at the onset of COVID when I decided to leave a dead-end job. The idea was to put to use the over 30 years of experience in retail and marketing to help brands that were then largely offline anchored & were lost in deciding how to pivot to an online strategy.
I would say my biggest challenge is still to convince the potential of online marketing and e-commerce. I do believe brands can grow much faster if they embrace all the changes that are happening in online retail.
What is your leadership philosophy, and how do you ensure that it is reflected throughout your organization?
I run a soloprebeur consultancy, so I do not have employees. However, what I do as a service to my clients is to build the internal marketing and eCommerce teams. Hence Along with my client’s organization culture, with marketing and eCommerce teams, my focus is on fostering an approach of innovation, a strong focus on ROI, and working collaboratively. These are essential in every organization & important for marketers.
How do you balance the need to innovate and take risks with the need to maintain stability and profitability?
Early in my career, the importance of ROI was drilled down quite well. Whether it was in my advertising career where our Directors emphasized that we needed to be mindful of how much we spent our clients budgets to the last decade and a half as a marketing P&L owner, it was essential.
This approach has helped me get more efficient in my spending as well as always be results driven. In retail & marketing, it’s easy to chase what I call vanity metrics, while what we need to really focus on is performance metrics.
How do you identify and develop the talent within your organization, and what role do you see mentorship playing in this process?
Mentorship is crucial at all stages of one’s career. As one grows, the need for a mentor changes from someone who helps you understand the job to someone who guides you and gently maneuvers you in the right direction. Mentors impact us for life. Some of my early mentors, including my first boss, taught me many invaluable lessons, which I still benefit from even today, & needless to say, pass on further too.
A good mentor makes you think, analyze & then act. They give you advice, as I have seen, that works as well professionally as also personally (I know how one of my favorite bosses advise to me on client management, and I could also apply it to my son, who was a young child then!)
What are the products and services that your company specializes in?
I would say I specialize in identifying what the organization really needs & then build a solution to address it. My focus is on how to do so efficiently. Quite often customers put the problem as X, but when I deep dive into the current performance numbers & also discuss with other key members of the team, you realize that the problem statement is actually quite different. I would say that’s my differentiation & what my clients benefit from.
How has the technology helped your customers for a seamless experience?
Technology has definitely made a lot more possible. From analytics, which can show you your performance very differently, to tools to manage your marketing campaigns. These tech tools ensure you are more focused on strategizing and monitoring results. Today AI has added a benefit of being able to leave the grudge work to it, like automising customer service (but ensure escalations are handled manually!) to creating visuals for campaigns. Technology has also brought in the simplicity of monitoring sales across various offline and online channels seamlessly. This makes the selling process more efficient and sends the right data to your production, procurement, and logistics teams too. For marketing, the insights help you plan your price and promotions effectively.
How do you decide to take the company a step further in terms of your products/services?
The next step would of course be to scale up, but still with a focus on helping startups & SMEs scale up efficiently.
