Best marketing professional of the year:

Wickramage bags OMO Award

Shirajiv SIRIMANE

A budding electrical sales representative from a hamlet in Kurunegala bagged yet another accolade when he was adjudged the best marketing professional of the year at the annual OMO Awards in Singapore last week.

As a youth, he excelled as an athlete and a boxer at his alma mater Trinity College. Having won college and public school colours, a head injury cut short his promising sporting career.

After leaving the school he started from the Hideki group selling TV sets and Amano clocks and then moved to Keells Food Products and got involved in promoting Atlas super markets. He then joined the Maharajah Group and created a major buzz by introducing the Pepsi plastic take home bottle setting standards in the industry.

He became a ‘hot’ marketing personality when he single handedly turned around the S-Lon Pipes Manufacturing Company that was on the verge of being folded up. “Taking over S-Lon in 1990 was one of my biggest challenges as it only had 14 percent market share.

In three years I rebuilt the company and its market share shot up to 80 percent and S-Lon became a house hold name,” Ceylon Biscuits Limited Group Sales and Marketing Head Nandana Wickramage said.

In 1996 he joined Cargills and introduced the concept of super marketing converting the narrow up market niche to the mass consumer through the “Food City” chain of supermarkets. “Food City” has become market leader within three years.

Moving out of the Cargills Food City he joined Ceylon Biscuits Limited as Sales and Marketing Head and due to his sheer skills was co-opted to the main board in one year.

Today, Wickramage is one of the most successful marketeers in the country. He has become renowned for his ability to turn around brands and drive them to market leadership in their respective categories. His continuing success in this highly challenging task proves the efficacy of his practical and creative approach to strategic planning and brand building. Nandana leading the largest and most successful sales and marketing team in Sri Lanka carries the responsibility for retaining the top positions earned for brands of the company under his leadership. He was also successful in increasing the market share of Ceylon Biscuits Limited from 23 percent to 60 percent in a short period of time.

Under his tenure, the company turnover has grown by a phenomenal 1500 percent (from under a billion Sri Lanka Rupees in 2000 to a staggering 15 billion level by 2010). “This has not been achieved merely by eating into the competition but also by driving category growth of biscuits, chocolates, cakes, soy products and nutritional supplementary food products,” he said.

He said that being crowned as the marketing professional of the year is a major achievement since no one had to apply to get the award. “The award presented by this USA based association, is on merit and based on the total career in management and on strategic leadership.

Wickramage however says that he still values the ‘global brand leadership award which he received at the World Business congress in India as ‘special’.

He was happy about the competition they face. However, he said at times he was disappointed and sad about the unethical competition in the market. “When one of our competitors was facing a crisis we came forward to support them.

However when they can’t get the targeted market share, they run down the competitors,” he said. Wickramage was instrumental in developing and implementing two major ongoing CSR programmes, a scholarship programme for less fortunate children and a programme that identifies and fulfils a major need in rural villages, which have achieved outstanding results.

A loving father of three his elder son Nadeesh (aged 21) is an undergraduate at Monash University. The twins Nadeesha and Nishadi (aged 19) have completed their schooling at Ladies College, Colombo and commenced their higher studies on Montessori teaching at Association Montessori International (AMI).