Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Marketing that connects strategy, growth and market influence.
Two decades connecting positioning, GTM, growth and communications to shape brands, create demand and build lasting market presence.
Experience
Five organisations across enterprise technology, consulting and digital services. Select an organisation to view the mandate and its outcomes.
Senior Manager, Content Strategy
Assistant Director, Brand Marketing and Communications
Content Strategy Manager
Marketing and Communications — four roles
Twelve years across partner programme communications, community and demand marketing, external communications and analyst relations — including an assignment out to MAFTECH in the UAE to stand up communications for a newly launched technology organisation.
Channel Programs and Communications Manager
Expertise
01
Defining what a business stands for, where it plays and how it should be understood.
Bringing business priorities, market insight and leadership perspectives together into a clear position that guides marketing and go-to-market decisions.
02
Connecting marketing strategy to growth, pipeline and revenue.
Aligning marketing, sales and business priorities around the right audiences, routes to market and integrated programmes, with measurable commercial outcomes at the centre.
03
Creating connected experiences that give audiences a reason to pay attention and act.
Setting the strategy across content, channels and customer journeys so every interaction supports a wider business and marketing objective.
04
Helping leaders and organisations communicate in ways that people understand, trust and act on.
Shaping communication across leadership, employees and external audiences, particularly when alignment, change or cultural understanding matters.
05
Building credibility through the people and organisations that influence how a market thinks.
Using analyst relationships, industry influencers, communities and partner ecosystems to strengthen market perception, establish category credibility and create wider market influence.
06
Building a marketing function that can scale, adapt and stay focused on results.
Bringing strategy, resources, technology and measurement together to improve how marketing operates, with AI increasingly built into the workflow to increase capacity and effectiveness.
How I work
A flexible AI-enabled workflow across research, strategy, GTM, campaigns, content and analysis, built to increase the volume and speed of work while keeping it tied to the business outcome.
Bringing together market, customer, competitor and industry information, testing ideas, and strengthening positioning and GTM decisions.
A strong proposition becomes a connected set of campaigns, thought leadership, sales decks, events, webinars, email, social and web content, without starting again each time.
Sales feedback, audience insight and performance results feed back in, so the next piece of work benefits from what the last one taught.
At ZainTECH this approach produced 150+ demand assets, with individual propositions generating 9+ connected assets across audiences and channels.
AI is part of building a more effective marketing function. It gives greater capacity to focus on growth, strategy and results, while the thinking, judgement and quality of the work stay mine.
Markets
Markets with in-depth expertise
Proof
Real-world examples of strategy, judgement and execution solving complex business challenges and delivering meaningful outcomes.
ZainTECH · Positioning, GTM and integrated marketing
As ZainTECH expanded its portfolio across cloud, AI, digital services, infrastructure and cybersecurity, the business needed a clearer way to articulate what it stood for — and to take that story consistently to market.
Working with senior leadership, business leaders, sales and marketing, helped shape the Digital. Intelligent. Resilient. positioning, bringing a broad portfolio under one company narrative. Then made that positioning usable: GTM strategies and integrated programmes across priority offerings and markets, spanning campaigns, events, webinars, pitch decks, thought leadership, case studies, web, email and social, supported by an AI-powered content model.
Soroco · Content strategy and category creation
Soroco was building its presence in an emerging category and needed a clearer market story. The brief covered content strategy across the business, but the larger challenge was shaping how the company and its category were understood.
Worked across leadership, sales and marketing to connect market feedback with positioning and content strategy — repositioning the website and digital content, strengthening the CEO and CTO’s external presence, and building a consistent story across social and other channels. Analyst relations was a second route to market, engaging Everest Group, NelsonHall, Forrester and HFS Research.
IBM Consulting × MAFTECH · Change and internal communications
Assigned to help set up the internal communications function for 9,000+ employees. When the UAE moved to a Monday-to-Friday working week in January 2022, it was more than a change of working days: Friday carries deep cultural and religious significance in the GCC. An initial survey showed only 60–64% positive sentiment.
Worked closely with senior management to shape the strategy and win their backing, particularly around respecting Friday prayer times — then shifted the conversation from “working Fridays” to “getting Sundays back”. The Reclaiming Sundays campaign invited employees to share what Sundays meant to them through photographs and stories about family, faith and friends. Their stories became the campaign.
IBM WebSphere · Community, influencer and demand marketing
IBM WebSphere had around 34,000 users inside the 93,000-member IBM Middleware User Group. Enterprise purchases were signed off by senior decision-makers, but developers, architects and technical specialists had significant influence over what was actually adopted and used.
Treated the community as somewhere to learn and participate rather than a channel to market to. Over three years, built a more active model using practitioner content, forums, challenges, peer recognition, product education and expert access — including a virtual “event-in-a-box” micro-event format combining expert sessions, smaller interactive discussions and direct access to IBM specialists, plus expanded participation from IBM Business Partners.
References
“Her ability and attitude to easily take on new challenges and projects definitely make her a valuable asset to any team. Fun but always professional, Aparna brings great energy into teams that she works with.”
“Aparna is a thorough content creator and communicator, and adds a fun element to the team she belongs to. I have seen her excel in her job wherein peers and stakeholders have always been appreciative of her contribution.”
Interests
A few things I care about, make time for, and genuinely enjoy.
Two semesters as visiting guest faculty at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore in 2015–16, teaching Principles of Marketing to undergraduate students and evaluating student coursework. The most enjoyable part was taking marketing beyond textbooks and connecting the principles to how brands, businesses and people actually behave.
Long-form editing across fiction and non-fiction, with a focus on structure, flow, clarity, consistency and language, following Oxford style conventions. Good editing should strengthen the writing while preserving the author’s voice, rather than replacing it with the editor’s.
Non-fiction audiobook narration under the name Aura Forge, bringing together storytelling, voice and a love of the written word. Each book calls for its own pace, tone and character, while staying true to the author’s ideas and making the listening experience feel natural.
Selected narration
Parenting a neurodivergent child brings questions and experiences that can be easier to discuss with someone who has lived through them. A few hours each week are set aside for informal conversations with parents and families looking for perspective, practical guidance, or simply a safe space to talk things through.
About
Nearly two decades across global brands, markets and almost every corner of marketing have given me breadth, perspective and the curiosity to keep learning.
My work spans positioning, GTM, growth, content, communications, digital and analyst relations. What connects it all is understanding the business first, then bringing the right parts of marketing together to drive growth and strengthen market presence.
I’m always up for a good conversation about how marketing is changing, particularly with AI, but also about things that matter to me personally: women’s representation, mental health, neurodiversity in the workplace and what meaningful allyship actually looks like.
After 19 years, there’s still plenty I want to learn, build and contribute.
Contact
Whether it is a narrative that needs sharpening, a communications function that needs building, or a go-to-market that needs a voice — I would like to hear about it.
aparna15k@gmail.com