Luisa Rojas, EveryDrop brand manager, left the world of dollars and cents behind and set out on a new career path in brand marketing. “My background is actually financial services,” said Rojas. “I started out in investment banking, but I didn’t like that work too much. It didn’t make me tick. It was a great learning experience, though.” Now armed with an MBA from Notre Dame University and some experience in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), she’s ready to tackle a new challenge and a new role with EveryDrop water.
“It’s a growth area of the business,” said Rojas. “With that comes a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges. I’m very excited to be here.” She initially met with representatives of Whirlpool Corp. at a career conference. “I walked up to their booth and introduced myself and they invited me to their happy hour and then invited me back for a first round interview.” Rojas visited St. Joe for the first time a month later and liked what she saw, so she continued with the hiring process. She began working at Whirlpool in mid-summer of this year.
In addition to a desire to work in CPG, Rojas was attracted to Whirlpool by the culture. “I really enjoyed all of the people that I met,” she said. “I also liked the fact that I would have the opportunity to move around within the company. I want to be able to grow and expand the breadth of my knowledge in marketing. I also liked that they asked me: Where do you want to be?”
Like many brands within the company, EveryDrop is going through some very positive changes. The most sweeping change is a move that brought all of the water filtration products that were previously with the brands under a single umbrella, marking them all with the EveryDrop logo. With this change will come some of those challenges with marketing that Rojas mentioned. The EveryDrop team will be aided in their rebranding efforts by a new agency, Young & Rubicam of Chicago. “We lack a lot of consumer-focused research,” said Rojas. “We have a lot of product research. So one of the initiatives that I’ve been tasked with is to work with Y&R to help us to develop a brand strategy. We are currently going through a rebranding with the goal of developing our foundational brand pillars.”
To develop these pillars, Rojas is working to answer a lot of questions about the brand and its products. “What are our values? What do we stand for? What’s the reason to buy us? We want to make sure that the answers to all of those questions come from a place of consumer insights,” she said. “We are working really hard to not only do a lot of mining in our current research, but also in building a foundational brand strategy based on some new insights.”