Leaving to stay for ever
Fabiana Pereira
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Written by: Eliana Silva
There are adventures and adventures, and every time Fabiana Pereira has left her comfort zone, Maputo, she has done so with Mozambique in her heart and soul. Her most recent departure took this marketer to live in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam.
Fabiana feels that the expression ‘leaving Mozambique’ is too strong to describe what she has done over the years: “Every time I left, Mozambique never left me. It sounds like a cliché, but that is exactly how I see it, and perhaps that is why I always find my way back,” she shares.
Born in Maputo, Fabiana Pereira began exploring new places right after secondary school, when she went to university in Portugal. An exchange in Brazil followed, with various leisure trips to different places around the world in between.
Among the latitudes and longitudes she has visited, this was the second time Fabiana set off to embrace new professional challenges: “The first was in 2013, 2014, to take up a management position for a segment of brands distributed across several countries. The base was Johannesburg, South Africa, but my routine involved travelling to be closer to the teams and consumers in the markets. I was lucky to get to know several countries on the continent and so grow my list. Yes, I have a list, as travelling and discovering new places is something I love,” she reveals, excitedly, adding: “This year I was given a new challenge, leading the Marketing team of AB InBev’s Southeast business unit. This unit has 6 countries – Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia –, with its base in Tanzania.”
Aware that Marketing and Advertising is a highly attractive field, Fabiana stresses how demanding the whole process of creating a product and effectively connecting it to the market is. “The beer market is always a topic of conversation. There are many questions and opinions, almost as if there were a master brewer inside each of us, and our process of staying up to date begins exactly at that moment. It is by listening to consumers, friends’ opinions and bar conversations that I “drink in” what is said and thought about my working world.” When asked about the various sources she uses to keep constantly up to date, Pereira highlights industry publications or newsletters, award-winning case studies, Instagram pages about creativity, pages of brands in diverse categories that inspire her, internal training or even market research.
“This year I was given a new challenge, leading the Marketing team of AB InBev’s Southeast business unit. This unit has 6 countries – Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia –, with its base in Tanzania”
Fabiana fulfilled the dream of putting Mozambique on the map of international successes, and nowadays brand activities carried out locally are a reference in some business areas. Today, a little further north, the dream has changed: “Now my dream is to put this business unit on the map, and we have the people, the attitude and, of course, the right brands for it.”
Can you pick a favourite brand? – we asked. “I usually say I have many children and all of them are special. I really do love building each of the brands in our portfolio. Whatever the segment, positioning or function, each brand is an essential piece, and it is this diversity that makes my role more interesting. However, I confess I have a special fondness for local brands, brands that proudly celebrate the DNA of their respective countries. In fact, one of the things I like most about this company is having access to know-how, frameworks and experts from all over the world, used to build international brands and local brands alike.
We also wanted to know what the main challenges of her work were, to which Fabiana promptly replied: “In this role, I would say one of the challenges is keeping a team spread across 6 different countries engaged and connected. Another is accelerating the business growth curve and the development of the marketing function in every country. Yet another, which is ongoing and very important to me, is making sure that all brand activities are relevant to consumers. Knowing that they see themselves in them, that they smile, that they are moved, is an incomparable feeling. It is through the engagement of those who consume our brands that we also gauge the success of our work, and it is a positive challenge to be able to develop, every day, ways of winning the choice and the hearts of so many people spread across the continent.
