Neda Kitanovska — Marketing Consultant & Strategist
After 15+ years diagnosing growth gaps and turning ambiguity into structured, KPI-driven executions, the crucial thing one should know is that marketing campaigns that start with a strategy, maxxing* it one decision at a time, create less noise, more structure, better activation and greater results.
*Maxxing — where ambition meets iteration.
About
As your outsourced marketing lead, I bring senior-level strategy without the full-time overhead — stepping in to diagnose what's broken, set direction, and own the results. Fifteen-plus years navigating complex, regulated, fiercely competitive markets across Europe.
A strategist who executes. A leader who delivers.
Need a fractional marketing director? I can step in as your outsourced marketing leadership — setting strategy, managing teams, owning P&L accountability and aligning marketing with your commercial goals. All the benefits of a CMO without the full-time cost.
I'm Neda — a strategic marketeer with 15+ years of experience navigating complex, regulated, and fiercely competitive markets across Europe and beyond.
My career spans roles from Trade Marketing Executive Director at TKP, to CEO of a local company working with brands like Zippo, Victorinox and Mont Blanc, to Multi-Category Deployment & Activation Manager for British American Tobacco's Adria region. I've lived and worked in Prague, Bucharest, Skopje, and Zagreb — understanding markets not just from spreadsheets, but from the ground up.
I've worked across regulated markets in Central and Eastern Europe, with exposure to regional strategy at Area and Global level. I understand how local nuance and global direction intersect.
Now I bring that corporate-grade expertise to ambitious brands and businesses — as a consultant who can plug in at the strategic level, diagnose what's broken, and build what's missing.
Services
Finding the idea before making the campaign.
Redesigned deployment and activation frameworks that reversed multi-market share stagnation across Adria.
Owning a space that competitors can't touch.
Building brand guidelines from the bottom up, reinforcing product category positions for both premium and value-for-money products.
Ideas built to survive contact with the market.
Led end-to-end product launches and recovery plans that exceeded KPI and ROI benchmarks.
Performance without losing the plot.
Turned multi-market share stagnation into accelerated growth and a strengthened premium mix.
Infrastructure that scales with intent.
Built ADRIA's full digital stack from the ground up — AI platforms, SEO, CRM, social media and Google Ads.
Launching into new regions without losing the brand.
Directed brand guidelines and activation strategies across countries, categories and different channels.
Grounding decisions in evidence, not assumption.
Translated consumer insight into commercially precise problem statements ahead of every launch.
Bringing strategy into the room, on the ground.
Over 100 events managed start to finish — from corporate team-buildings to festivals.
Getting the message in front of the right audience, at the right price.
Directed PR and media buying across Adria's multi-market activation campaigns, reinforcing #1 category positions.
Turning strategy into words people actually read.
Edited the International Tobacco Tasting Association's yearly journal for three consecutive years and authored brand messaging across every market I've led.
Purpose-built systems and automations that fit your business, not the other way around.
Designed custom CRM and reporting workflows that gave scattered regional teams one shared source of truth.
Streamlining processes and tools to work smarter and scale faster.
Owned P&L accountability and cross-market operations for British American Tobacco's Adria region, orchestrating deployment at scale.
Approach
Think
Before a single asset is made, the work is understanding what's actually stopping people from choosing you.
Create
Ideas that survive contact with the market are simple enough to repeat and specific enough to matter.
Measure
Vanity metrics get replaced with the handful of numbers that tell you whether the idea is working.
Selected Thinking
Challenge
Multi-market share stagnation across the Adria region, with growth plateauing on both FMC and premium lines.
Approach
Redesigned deployment and activation frameworks across every market, closing portfolio gaps through targeted activation and pricing strategy.
Outcome
Accelerated FMC share growth · Strengthened premium mix
Challenge
Portfolio gaps were limiting premium brand growth and leaving share recovery on the table.
Approach
Led end-to-end product launches and recovery plans, translating consumer insight into commercially focused initiatives.
Outcome
Exceeded KPI and ROI benchmarks · #1 category positions reinforced
Challenge
Digital execution was inconsistent market to market, with no shared infrastructure to build on.
Approach
Built the full digital scene across Adria from the ground up — AI platforms, SEO, CRM and Google Ads — into one standardized, scalable system.
Outcome
Consistent digital activation across every market
Challenge
A business reliant on a narrow revenue base, competing in a market that rewarded diversification and operational discipline.
Approach
As CEO, transformed organizational strategy — diversifying revenue streams, implementing governance frameworks, and building a culture of innovation and stakeholder collaboration.
Outcome
Diversified revenue base · Positioned as a trusted industry leader
Numbers don't lie
Before I say yes
Experience
British American Tobacco — orchestrating multi-market, multi-category deployment strategies, owning P&L across markets and building the region's full digital infrastructure. Present.
British American Tobacco, Zagreb, Croatia — brand deployment strategy and campaign activation across the Adria region. Also held Campaign Planning Manager, SCEA (Bucharest, Romania) during this tenure, overseeing regional campaign planning and coordination.
British American Tobacco, Bucharest — strategic planning and premium brand positioning for the portfolio's most premium brand. Also held Brand Executive, Rothmans — Abel Team (Prague, Czech Republic) earlier in her BAT career, devising deployment frameworks that fortified brand equity.
Prima MK, Official JTI importer & distributor for Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo — crafted targeted activation campaigns and POSM solutions, delivering insights that unlocked new growth.
Evroprogres Trade, Skopje, Macedonia — led organizational strategy and expansion, diversifying revenue streams and implementing governance frameworks for sustainable growth.
Tobacco Company JSC Prilep (PMI) — trade marketing initiatives, distribution strategy and product launches that reinforced market leadership.
Evroprogres Trade, Macedonia — early marketing leadership role ahead of the CEO appointment.
Swiss company, owner of the VAYO brand for THP — online campaigns, new product development and new product portfolios.
Resume
Founded and led a charitable organization in Skopje, Macedonia, fulfilling the wishes of terminally ill children through strategic partnerships and fundraising initiatives.
Organized and marketed the International Tobacco Tasting Association's flagship 3-day event for 150+ participants; edited the association's yearly journal, three years running.
Journal
Playing it safe feels cheaper. It isn't. I've watched multi-market share stagnation happen slowly, then all at once — not because a team lacked budget, but because every decision was optimized to avoid risk instead of to win. Averaging out a message so it offends no one also means it moves no one.
When we redesigned deployment and activation frameworks across Adria, the hardest part wasn't the analysis. It was convincing stakeholders that the safe version of the plan was the actual risk — because "safe" was what had produced the stagnation in the first place. Bold isn't reckless. Bold is specific enough to be wrong, which is the only way it can also be right.
The markets that recovered fastest weren't the ones that spent more. They were the ones that closed portfolio gaps with a clear point of view and backed it with pricing and activation discipline. Average marketing spends its way around a weak idea. Bold marketing spends less because the idea is doing the work.
By the time a brief lands on a creative team's desk, most of the important decisions have already been made — usually implicitly, usually by whoever wrote the brief under time pressure. The real work of marketing happens earlier: in the diagnosis of what's actually stopping someone from choosing you.
Leading end-to-end product launches and recovery plans taught me that the initiatives which exceeded KPI and ROI benchmarks weren't the ones with the cleverest execution. They were the ones where someone had done the unglamorous work of translating consumer insight into a commercially precise problem statement before a single asset existed.
A brief should be the record of a decision already made with conviction, not the starting gun for a debate that should have happened weeks earlier. If the brief is where the thinking begins, you're already behind the market you're trying to win.
Working on Dunhill — the most premium brand in a competitive portfolio — made one thing unambiguous: premium positioning isn't purchased with media weight, it's earned through consistency long before and long after the campaign runs. Turn the budget off, and what's left is either a brand or it's just an ad that used to run.
Reinforcing a #1 category position across Adria came down to protecting the handful of things that were true about the brand in every market, every channel, every year — not chasing whatever performed best that quarter. Consistency is unglamorous. It is also the entire job.
The question I ask before any campaign goes live: if we pulled all paid media tomorrow, would people still recognize what we stand for? If the honest answer is no, the campaign was never building a brand — it was renting attention.
Let's Connect
Have a challenge worth solving? Tell me where growth is stalling and let's talk strategy.
Book a strategy call