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SHEILA OWITI
GROUP HEAD OF BRAND, MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS AAR INSURANCE
Building Brands from the Inside Out
“Earlier in my career, success was defined by the quality of the campaign, the strength of the creative, or how effectively we built the brand. As my role expanded, I realised that at the leadership table, that is only part of the conversation.”
Sheila is Group Head of Brand, Marketing and Communications at AAR Insurance Kenya, where she leads the brand, marketing and communications agenda and sits on the Executive Committee. Her experience spans brand strategy, integrated marketing, martech transformation, reputation management, innovation and product development. The breadth is the point: it is what allows her to treat marketing as part of business strategy rather than as the function that announces decisions once they have been made.
Her route to that table, however, began on the other side of the client relationship.
An agency grounding
Sheila spent more than a decade at integrated marketing and communications agencies, rising from Account Executive to senior client leadership and eventually business units. The work took her across industries and business problems, and taught her to interrogate a brief, read an audience and turn strategy into ideas that land. Above all, it taught her that creativity earns its place only when it solves a business problem.
Agency life also shaped how she leads: at pace, comfortable with change, and practised at rallying different disciplines behind a single objective.
Crossing to the corporate side changed her vantage point entirely. She no longer met the business through a brief. She was part of it, accountable not only for how a proposition was communicated but for whether it worked.
Bringing the customer into the room
One discipline Sheila has deliberately embedded into her approach is research.
“Experience gives you instinct, but instinct alone can be dangerous, because it is shaped by what we already know and believe. Research brings the customer into the room. It tells us how people see the brand, what they value, where their frustrations lie, and sometimes it tells us something we did not expect to hear.”
She uses it less as a report card on marketing performance than as an input to decisions: brand positioning, customer propositions, communication, and where the money goes. Tracking the brand consistently over time, she argues, is what separates genuine shifts in customer perception from internal assumptions.
“The value of research is quite simple. It replaces we think with we know.”
What marketing owes an insurer
Insurance makes the argument for her better than most categories could. It is a promise sold long before it is experienced, and its value is proven at the hardest moments in a customer’s life, when someone is ill, bereaved or counting a loss. In a market where scepticism about insurers is the default rather than the exception, no campaign can out-communicate a difficult claims experience.
That reality sits behind how Sheila thinks about brand and reputation.
“Marketing may articulate the promise, but the entire organisation delivers it. The customer’s experience of your people, products, processes and platforms ultimately determines what your brand means.”
Reputation, in her view, accumulates through what an organisation consistently does; communications exist to make sure that what it says holds up against that experience. The principle informs how she approaches media relations, stakeholder engagement, thought leadership, internal communications and the handling of sensitive corporate issues, and it has convinced her that today’s marketing leader must be as adept at protecting trust as at building awareness.
At AAR, that has meant a mandate stretching well past marketing communications into brand transformation, corporate reputation, digital platforms, customer engagement, product launches and stakeholder communications, all in service of the company’s promise of Redefining Insurance. She has helped steer the brand through defining moments, including its 40th anniversary, new propositions for distinct customer segments, and the growth of its digital ecosystem, alongside a sustained effort to make insurance something people can engage with simply and confidently.
What leadership has taught her
Sheila has been just as deliberate about her own development. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration with specialization in Marketing and Management and an MBA degree in Strategic Management, with a GPA of 3.854/4. Both degrees were obtained from the United States International University-Africa. She is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (MCIM). Her learning spans strategic management, marketing, finance and corporate leadership, complemented by executive development and mentorship programmes. She treats these less as credentials than as building blocks for a more rounded business leader.
Her particular interest lies where marketing meets strategy: in what happens when marketers apply their understanding of customers, markets and human behaviour to the organisation’s wider decisions.
The marketer ahead
The marketing leaders who matter most in the coming years, Sheila believes, will be those willing to widen the definition of the role. Creativity, culture, channels and consumers will remain essential. So will commercial fluency, technological curiosity, strategic judgement and the ability to influence across functions.
“Marketing should not simply be the function that takes a product to market. It should help the business decide what is worth taking to market in the first place.”
LinkedIn recognizes Sheila as an award-winning brand, marketing and communications leader and strategist, an integrated marketing guru, a multi-industry marketing expert and event guru. This is who she is.
