Building A Strategic Brand

A sales and marketing professional with 16 years of experience in leading high-performing teams and building engaging brand experiences, Bhawna Sikka, the category head for GSK’s digestive health business, has spent the last three years not only delivering strong business performance but also winning marketing campaigns for the brand Eno. 

Earlier, she worked as a global marketing and strategy lead on Eno for India and the MEA region. She led Eno to become an industry-recognised brand with several external felicitations. 

During her stint with Nestlé India, she worked across different categories like the marketing manager for Maggi Light Meals. She led the re-launch of the pasta and soups portfolio resulting in brand growth of 26 per cent and 400 basis points share gain on pasta and revival of soups with seven per cent growth.

Winning Strategies

In her journey as a marketer, Sikka achieved big milestones, one of the major changes she led on Eno was introducing region-specific communication in 2016. This change enabled the brand to achieve a milestone of 50 per cent share in 2016 and 16 quarters of consistent outpacing of category growth.

“One of the areas that I continue to work on is the ability to make decisions even when detailed data is not yet available,” Sikka says. Understanding consumer insights, she looks to build a strategic brand outlook at GSK. In the last six years, she has led comprehensive consumer work along with initiating research. One of her success stories is a digital campaign leveraging data and technology that resulted in double-digit growth for the brand.  

A Focussed Approach

“In 2020, while budgets were getting rationalised, we decided to remain steadfast in the pursuit of rural penetration, which resulted in a digital campaign based on leveraging data. We took population census data and identified villages with a 10,000 population. Leveraging technology, Jio made smartphones accessible everywhere and with them and Facebook we overlayed the census data with identified pin codes to define our targeted villages. The results spoke for themselves,” says Sikka.

The brand registered double-digit growth, led by its rural market in a challenging year. Eno was one of the first few consumer brands to design successful rural campaigns. Having foreseen the power of data availability in rural India, Sikka led industry-first campaigns, which have been acknowledged for innovative media deployment.