Martin Trepáč

Martin Trepáč, Director of Marketing CZ & SK at Philip Morris CR a.s.

Martin Trepáč is one of those admirable people that have their career goals under control. He figures that most of his success was due to “being in the right place at the right time.” In fact, there was no hard-earned achievement after a series of failures, or a sudden lucky win. Simply put, Martin studied diligently and practiced what interested him, and hence, excelled at it.

In his thirties, Martin became the marketing manager at Phillip Morris International Management SA, and subsequently became the Brand Director of Marlboro in Phillip Morris GmbH. Two and a half years later, in February 2014, he achieved the position of Marketing Director in Phillip Morris ČR a.s., where he presently works.

“I realized early enough to listen or accept others’ opinions, while I was improving my education by studying in the MBA program at UNYP. In my classes, I met students who worked in different industries and realized that even though marketing is mainly about intuition and common sense, if you spend a great deal of time in one field, it influences the way you think. But by including the opinions of others you open the door for your career development and personal growth.

For example, we were tasked to prepare a strategy for crisis communication for a particular case. One colleague, let’s say from the automobile industry, came up with a completely different scenario than a colleague from the cosmetic industry, and neither one had the same idea as the colleague from banking. Furthermore, no one was correct. Eventually, we took the best aspects of everyone’s ideas in the group and created a great strategy that worked.

I started my MBA at UNYP because I needed to move my degree from marketing, which I previously earned as a EUBA in Bratislava, to an international level. Secondly, I wanted to improve my knowledge in finance, law and so on, to improve as a business professional. And at the time, I was in a rut that I needed to get out of. I think it went well.

Thanks to the time spent at UNYP and the interactions with people from different environments, as I mentioned before, I managed to get a better overview, network, and learned more about benchmarking.”

To read more about Martin’s experience at UNYP or how he developed his career, you can read the full article in Czech.

Published by Forbes CR on 06/05/2015.

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