5 questions for… Manuela Stamatovic

Manuela Stamatović was born and educated in Switzerland. She studied business and marketing in Paris and acquired the title – master manager of European business and marketing.

She started working very early, which is typical for Switzerland. She got her first job at the age of 10 babysittings two girls every Wednesday afternoon when she wasn’t going to school. As a teenager, she worked in a supermarket on Wednesday afternoons, where her duties were cleaning and arranging shelves, stacking and replenishing goods, and similar tasks. That experience was of significant benefit to her when she started working at L’Oreal and engaged in product positioning on store shelves. She did not work during college because internships were very rare at the time – but she got a job at Coca-Cola very soon after graduation.

She has worked all of her careers within her goal profession: she is an expert in marketing, brand management, and corporate communications thanks to almost two decades of work experience in the consumer goods industry, banking, and aviation. In Coca-Cola, she worked as a law graduate at a bottling plant in Belgrade. After that, she moved to L’Oreal – where she worked for the first year in the marketing team in Paris, which was in charge of the markets of the former Yugoslavia and the former republic of the Soviet Union. When she returned to Belgrade, she was responsible for building a marketing team for the Serbian market for the consumer goods division (and the L’Oreal Paris, Garnier, and Maybelline brands), and later for the Bulgarian market. After L’Oreal, she moved to the banking sector, where she first worked as a marketing director at Erste Bank – and then as a marketing and communications director at Sberbank. Her last corporate job was for Air Serbia as Marketing and Corporate Affairs Director.

Today, Manuela is the owner of Puzzle Consulting. Her company supports small and medium enterprises in marketing and communications – out of a desire to transfer their knowledge and love for marketing and help companies in their further development. These are companies that often do not have the opportunity to have their marketing team or cooperate with large marketing agencies. Puzzle Consulting conducts marketing strategy development, marketing planning, brand management, marketing team optimization, development and implementation of Customer Experience Management strategies, and planning and integrating corporate communications activities.

Company name represents the mission of creating a service for each client, according to his needs. They provide various services in marketing, business organization, implementation of activities, and education. It allows each client to individually choose just those services that he needs (pieces of the puzzle) and make a combination of services that he needs – to put together a puzzle of services to their liking.

Besides, she is a lecturer and mentor. She is one of the leading lecturers at the Mokrogorska School of Management in marketing management, as well as a mentor within the mentoring program of the Serbian Association of Managers.

One of the biggest challenges in her career was during her time with L’Oreal. It was necessary to launch and position the beauty brand Maybelline on the Serbian market – which was then unknown to our consumers. For someone who was starting in marketing, this was an incredible challenge, and at the same time an excellent foundation that contributed to its further development and advancement.

In addition to Serbian, Manuela speaks four other foreign languages ​​- German, English, French, and Italian.

She loves cinema, but she didn’t have a chance to go due to the pandemic in the past year. She enjoys reading books every day. She is very active, often walks, and walks almost everywhere. The sport she loves the most is swimming, and she regularly practices yoga, which helps her calm her thoughts at the end of an exhausting day.