Episode 152 / Monali Shah / The Coca-Cola Company / Head of Integrated Marketing Experiences, Africa
How Brands Can Embrace Culture to Ensure Diversity and Inclusion
As the Head of Integrated Marketing Experiences, Africa, at The Coca-Cola Company, Monali Shah focuses on shining a spotlight on the complexity and diversity of cultures and talents across all countries of the African continent. This also means that diversity and inclusion play a huge part in her hiring talent strategy. Her Shiny New Object is culture: the culture of teams and organisations that enables that true diverse message to be created.
Monali’s personal experience has influenced her interest in diversity and inclusion and in how culture shapes how people interact with each other and how they build a more inclusive message. This is why she places such great importance on organisational culture: A culture creates an environment… What sort of team do you want to create?
Hiring managers in marketing and beyond need to ask themselves how they can bring together talent that spans different cultures and backgrounds if they want to put a diverse message across. Monali thinks taking a step back and understanding the people around you first, creating that level of empathy that you need, is the first step towards succeeding in this.
Additionally, leaders need to try to not have any biases. Monali’s advice that she followed when building her team across Africa is to “look far and wide” for the right talent.
Considering the message you want to put across is also strongly linked to one of Monali’s top marketing tips: “Focus on the human being and the problem we’re trying to solve.” When building strong propositions, looking for the actual human problem that your product or service will solve is the key to adding value and staying relevant as a brand.
Learn more about Monali’s best investment in her career, her love of lifelong learning, and her approach to diversity and inclusion, by listening to the full episode.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the Shiny New Object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, and this is a show about the future of marketing. Every week or so I have the privilege and the pleasure to interview one of our industry's leaders about their vision and this week is absolutely no different. I'm on a call with Monali Shah, who is head of integrated marketing services Africa for the Coca Cola Company. Monali, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a bit of background and an overview?
Monali Shah 1:26
Sure. Hi, Tom and everyone. So my name is Monali Shah, as Tom said, I have another name. I'm known by two which is DJ lil Mo. But that's a story for another day. I look after IMex, which is integrated marketing experiences for the Coca Cola Company across the African continent. IMex is what we used to refer to as it integrated marketing communications, which we've sort of redefined. I'm0000 Kenyan Indian and I currently live in Lagos, Nigeria. In terms of background, I would say I have a bit of an abnormal or non traditional journey, if I may call it. In fact, I sometimes say I got to traditional marketing, by fluke in quotes. I started my career in the entertainment industry as a DJ actually in Kenya. I was part of a DJ group that was also an entertainment company in East Africa. And I got various experiences from sports, to entertainment marketing, especially music events, you know, building and running a studio, both audio and video, talent management, hosting radio shows, building and segment lead campaigns, etc. I think my biggest experience here I would call out is learning and building on to an entrepreneurial mindset. Because we started as a as just a group of DJs. By the time I left, we were like to a fully fledged entertainment company with a music and DJ Academy. Over the years, then I worked at MTV at different agencies, building a brand experience division or a company for brand experience. Until I worked at Ogilvy where I got that's where I moved into traditional IMC as we may know it, and I got quite a bit of experience in FMCG, telco, banking, you know, continued with entertainment markets thing before transitioning to Coke where I've been since 2014.
Tom Ollerton 3:43
So you were part of a successful DJ outfit, fully fledged entertainment company. Where did it all go wrong? Why did you give that up, that sounds amazing.
Monali Shah 3:52
I actually didn't give it up. Well, I should rephrase that. I'm trying to start DJing again, it's one of my passions. I think just building on two different experiences, I somehow just ended up moving into the agency world. So I worked for one of the WPP agencies in Kenya, which, where I was actually, you know, trying to build an experiential marketing division. And from that experience, I transitioned into traditional IMC. I think that's where I just because I was leading experiential and entertainment led campaigns, which was very rare at that time because often you find experiential entertainments is support. It's not the it's not the core of a campaign whilst I was doing something very different. And that's I think, what led me to my traditional marketing journey, but like I said, it was it was by fluke even when I joined Adobe actually joined the company to to lead brand assets for for aerosol which is a telco in India and Africa. And I ended up leading the whole rebranding exercise for the telco across 15 countries in Africa. And that's when I started to get into my traditional IMC journey.
Tom Ollerton 5:17
So in that unusual journey, what's been the best investment of your time, energy or money in your career?
Monali Shah 5:27
I would say continuous learning in two ways. So there's academic and experiences. If you if you look at my career journey, it's very, it's very non linear. It's not the traditional journey that people take. And I know nowadays, we talk about experience led careers, but I don't think it was, it's always been the norm. And this is the one thing that has led me to where I am today is having a multi faceted, experience led journey. So I've always said yes to the uncomfortable, or try to say yes to having different experiences. I think it helps you be creative, it helps you think of solving problems in in different ways. And mostly it opens you up to so many different career paths and, and also ways you can impact people, communities and business. And I think from an academic perspective, it's it's continuous learning on on things that I'm curious about. Sometimes they don't even fall within doing professionally, like I just signed up for a FinTech course, because I can see how this industry is booming in Africa. And I really want to know more about it. And, you know, but I'm sure I learned something in this course, that will provoke different thoughts in what I do with my team right now. Last year, I signed up for an eight week digital marketing courses to refresh my knowledge thought, I think just continuous learning has been an amazing investment of my time, energy, and money, actually, and I do it in, I guess, small, small pieces, if I can put it that way. And the second thing was during COVID actually, is a bike. So I have a spin bike at home, because I couldn't go out to the gym, or, you know, to work out. So I ended up buying a bike. And now I'm actually able to, like just spend for 10 minutes in between meetings, or, you know, and when I wake up, if I don't have enough time, for a full on workout, I can literally just put in 10 minutes of high intensity Spinrite and I'm good for the day. So I think that has been an amazing investment for me, it just really helps me, I guess clear my mind.
Tom Ollerton 7:49
So how would you want people to remember your career? At this point, they're gonna remember it's been varied and different backgrounds, different challenges, different teams, but what you want to get to what what does your career habitually look like?
Unknown Speaker 8:05
I'm that girl from Africa, who contributed to changing the game for us in Africa, and also had a huge impact on people, and specifically, the creative and music industries. There's a certain perception people have of Africa. And somehow I've always found myself pushing for make a positive impact either on the people we work with, or the image of Africa through all the work that I'm involved in. I'll give you one example. Have you ever heard about Coke Studio Africa?
Tom Ollerton 8:40
No.
Monali Shah 8:42
Okay. So I mean, it's a passion project for me. It was basically the music platform for us in Africa that celebrated African music in a way that sort of brought together cultures, music and musicians from Africa and celebrate them across the world. I think the core of it was built around this TV and radio show that brought together artists and music producers from across Africa to collaborate and make music together. Africa, very diverse. Sorry about that. That's my email. 54 countries and it's full of different cultures. And our music and musicians also vary across the different regions. Before Coke studio, most Africans didn't know music from other countries, including musicians from different countries. And I think from an industry perspective, we didn't really have a lot of cross country collaborations across Africa. So I'm so proud to have been part of creating this impact this change and enabling the cross border celebration and creation. And on top of it also introducing the world to African music, or at least playing a small part in it. It's You know, the proud moments that actually say we had a role to play in developing, enabling and empowering the music industry, from in Africa and as a rub off the entertainment industry, including the production industry as a whole.
Tom Ollerton 10:15
So what is your best marketing tip that you find yourself sharing most often?
Monali Shah 10:26
I don't know if it's a tip or a grounding statement. So Hannah Gordon, she was one of our former ECDs on our accounts, and we were in a conversation once, we was sort of talking to her about a presentation I was making and sharing some, you know, tips and learnings. And I couldn't put words to what I was trying to express. And she said to me, it's about how you make people feel. And you know, and we were talking about, like communication, like we were talking about advertising and communication. With, you know, traditionally, we've always had this, this, this question and a wave, how do you want to make people feel or how do you want people to feel, but I'm not sure we as marketers really take this as seriously. But if you take a step back and think about it, how we make people feel, every time we interact with them is super important. Whether we're making them cry, love, feel proud of their identity, whatever it is, I think it's really important because it drives some sort of a connection, you know, with, with, with a human being. And the second one actually is more of a learning for me, which is, which, which I think is true today more than ever is focusing on the human being. And the problem that we're trying to solve. Human human beings are very complex, but but we are also very simple. And we sort of need to add value to be relevant and, and if we see people as humans, and help solve human problems, we'll win. I think it's that simple for me.
Tom Ollerton 12:18
This episode of the Shiny New Object podcast is brought to you in partnership with MADFest. Whether it's live in London, or streamed online to the global marketing community, you can always expect a distinctive and daring blend of fast paced content, startup innovation pitches, and unconventional entertainment from MADfest events, you'll find me causing trouble on stage recording live versions of this podcast and sharing a beer with the nicest and most influential people in marketing, check it out at www.madfestlondon.com.
So we're gonna move on now to your shiny new object, which is culture, very broad. And it's been talked about a lot. So it's the the cultures are, certainly the workplace is kind of changing evolving things, especially after the last couple of years. So it would be great for you to describe why you've chosen culture as your shiny new object.
Monali Shah 13:24
I guess, culture is a very broad subject. I think, for me, it's really important and relevant now. So I started a new role in January, and I've been building a team for IMeX in Africa from scratch, since January. And to me, I feel like culture is organizational, our team culture is probably one of the most important things when it comes to the fuelling growth of a company. Because, you know, at the end of the day, it's human beings that we're working with, and it's a culture that creates an environment, whether it's a natural one where people thrive, or are the opposites. So, for me, you know, outside of the functional capabilities, one of the biggest things was to focus on culture, ensuring that scene that we put in place can actually add to the culture in a positive way and will fit into the culture that we once and I know there's a lot of different sort of ingredients that go into creating an awesome culture where people tries and you know, maybe we can get into that one day but but but today, I think I probably want to focus on on diversity and inclusion. And this is this is a bit personal to me. When growing up, I did go through quite a bit of exclusion, if I may call it whether it was through colorism or other things and and I think a really good thing came out of it, which is I naturally just became very inclusive of people and every aspect of people became very curious to understand other people and cultures. And we, when we talk about diversity and inclusion, I actually don't believe there's diversity without inclusion. And that's, that's a really important point. And when I talk about diversity, I mean, all kinds of diversity, gender, race, thoughts, background experience, everything, you know, if if we aren't open to embracing the differences, we won't be inclusive of each other. If we're not open to embracing sorry about that, if we're not open to embracing our differences, I don't think we'll be very inclusive of each other. And, and we really won't be able to bring to life the concept of diversity. So as I think about Africa, as I was, you know, building a team, we have 54 countries, we have very diverse regions, we have, you know, we have some similarities, which is the, the vibrancy, the energy of people of Africa, that kindness, entrepreneurial spirit, and mindset, all of those are similarities. But then we also have differences, differences in cultural differences in backgrounds. We have North Africa, we have West Africa, Central Africa, South Africa, East, you know, we have the islands, there's so much diversity. So if we, if we think about that, and if I had to put together a team that sort of is able to work with each other across Africa and bring to life, some amazing work across Africa, I think diversity and inclusion becomes a really, really big thing. To drive good culture. Because we need people to be working with each other. And we need people also to be building on the work that each other do. I think empathy and sort of compassion play a big role when it comes to bringing this to life.
I think if if we try and understand each other's differences and motivations behind our actions, sometimes it's cultural differences, right? I mean, like, I need to do something that you may be offended by, but it's, it really isn't, I'm not trying to be offensive, and it's just maybe my culture or you know, it might not be offensive where I come from. So I think if we just take a step back and try and understand the other person will be able to be more inclusive, and then bring to life diversity. And hiring this way, I think really helps a lot. Like when I look at, look at my team, I'm so proud, because, like, I really love the culture and the environments we've created. Like there's, there's no competition between the scene, I can see so much collaboration and, you know, very helpful spirits it brings to life, like a can do attitude. People who perform, you know, high performance is kind of like, their own personal requirements as an example. So, I think, I think it's just for me, the, the rub off of making sure that we have a diverse and inclusive team that impacts office is really big in creating that environment, but also, you know, affecting the outputs, I guess, if I may put it that way.
Tom Ollerton 19:06
So how do you hire in that situation? Like, how do you make sure that you're dipping into the right pools of talent in order to staff up in that diverse way?
Monali Shah 19:22
Um, I would say in being open, you know, like, being open to... it starts with the brief, right? Like, who are you trying to hire? What are you trying to say, what are you looking at when it comes to this person? But also just making sure that you are looking at, I guess, talent from across Africa, from across the different regions, just trying to balance it out and as you're hiring, just just making sure that you're actually embracing the differences and sort of trying to bring in those differences as well to help build that diverse that diversity differences in every way. I mean, it's not including functional, right, where people can learn from.
Tom Ollerton 20:23
And what what are the challenges you found with building this team? With this ambition in mind? What have been the things that you wish you'd done differently? If you can have a time again?
Monali Shah 20:40
The biggest challenge was probably the the amount of time it took me to hire because I really wanted to make sure I have the right team. So I would say it's just it's probably the time I mean, I'm still trying to finish putting the team together. In terms of what I would do differently. I, I don't I don't think I have anything that I would say right now that I would do differently. I have been pretty intentional about making sure that we, you know, that we are all intentional about, about having a diverse and inclusive team, where we are like building an amazing culture as well.
Tom Ollerton 21:44
So what advice would you give to someone who's about to follow in your footsteps, Sony believes in your methodology and your vision? But yet, they're like, Oh, where do I start? What advice would you give to them today to get moving in that direction?
Monali Shah 22:01
Be open, just just be open. I mean, try not have any biases. Be open to sort of, not just change, but to differences. Look wide? Look far and wide? You know? And second thing is also roughly be really clear, in terms of what is it that you're looking for? What is the start with? What is the culture that you want to create? What is the team environments that you want to create? And then from there, like, what is what is this when, if you're talking about the values, if you're talking about like, you know, diversity and inclusion, what, you know, what is it that you feel you need for your team, or you once in your team, and once I think once you're clear about that it's, you're able to look far and wide and, and like, and sort of reach the right people.
Tom Ollerton 23:11
So unfortunately, we're at the end of the podcast, and I know, there's going to be listeners who are really inspired and gonna want to reach out to you to discuss this. How would you like them to do that?
Monali Shah 23:24
Um, I believe LinkedIn would be the best way to each add to me.
Tom Ollerton 23:31
And what makes a great LinkedIn message to you to help how those people get the right thing in front of you to save yours. Time, what makes a really brilliant outreach.
Monali Shah 23:41
If it's something that feels personal, if it's something where I can add some value or impact in a positive way, I try and respond as soon as I can.
Tom Ollerton 23:54
That's fantastic advice. Monali, thank you so much for your time.
Monali Shah 23:57
Thank you.
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