A recipe for success: Six tips and the inspiration that won Jared Patel the Rising Star of the Year Award

By being named the Mondelēz 2022 Rising Star of the Year at the Marketing Achievement Awards (MAA), Jared Patel, head of marketing at Sea Harvest Group, was recognised as one of South Africa’s top minds who have demonstrated that they have the potential to become marketing industry leaders.

The criterion that determined Jared as the winner of the prestigious award was to clearly demonstrate that marketing can be used as a tool for business growth and should be purpose-led to drive positive change in society and towards the environment.

“I am incredibly honoured to have been recognised by the MAA and for Sea Harvest to have won two special commendation awards for our brand positioning and integrated marketing campaigns,” shares Patel. “The whole event was surreal and to see Sea Harvest competing against marketing industry giants was very special. It was inspiring to be around such amazing South African marketing minds. I have always been in love with my profession and to receive affirmation for the efforts is a dream come true.”

Talking about the award, Patel shares six tips that is the recipe for his success at Sea Harvest:

1. Try to understand the product or service deeply. Understand how your business creates what you sell. I spent a week out at sea on a fishing vessel in the first month of my career at Sea Harvest! It is one of the best things I could have done to really understand what it takes to get our product onto shelves.
2. Understand the market and consumer needs very well. For me this meant spending time in stores and asking consumers questions about our products. Being on top of this gives you the backbone to be able to thrive as a marketer.
3. Understand the business problem as best as possible and work on various angles to try to solve it. We worked with the McCain team on our Friends in your Freezer campaign to grow the whole frozen category and create greater buy in from consumers.
4. Don’t be afraid to do things a bit differently. The best marketers are fearless and have faith in their convictions. We created animated superhero characters that look like fish fingers, and it was completely whacky, but it worked.
5. Get comfortable with big data. Keep looking at the results, and test and revise your marketing strategies as often as possible. If something is not working, don’t lose hope, don’t give up when things don’t go well, and treat it as important key lessons. Marketing is a constant repetition of doing and testing and then redoing.
6. Have faith in your team, find their strengths, give them freedom to be bold and creative, and let them shine.

Talking about his sources of inspiration, “I look at the world around me through a branding and marketing lens. I place a big focus on improving my skills by reading books or listening to audio books by marketers and opinion leaders I respect,” shares Patel. “The level of excellence of marketing in South Africa is very high and it is very easy to be inspired by the work being done in our country. Being exposed daily to our diversity, cultures and people helps me to form ideas and helps my creativity.”

“Jared has been at Sea Harvest since 2010 when he started as a marketing graduate and has grown with the Group. He has demonstrated a great ability to use multiple forms of research like sales analytics, focus groups, product research, surveys, retailer shopper studies, trend reports and seminars, which he shares with the wider team. This strategy has resulted in a significant amount of market growth for Sea Harvest, especially in the very competitive fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector,” says Konrad Geldenhuys, sales and marketing director at Sea Harvest.

“Jared also pays attention to getting the best people and has recruited and developed an extremely talented team of young marketers straight from university. I have come to know Jared as a leader who has a consistent interest in developing his team,” says Geldenhuys.

To view Sea Harvest’s winning entries, please visit: https://bit.ly/3o6Ht6I and https://bit.ly/3yLfcHx.

For more information on Sea Harvest www.seaharvest.co.za Tel: 021 468 7900 / info@seaharvest.co.za

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