Meltem Heper

Management Consultant - Strategic Positioning

Global Partner @ RIES | Founder @ Magnetic Brand

Meltem’s passion is bringing CLARITY to Chaotic Environments to unleash Healthy Growth.

This passion has led her to focus on Strategic Positioning as a Management Consultant.

She helps Companies, Leaders and Cultures formulate their overall strategy in the light of a Clear Positioning to

become a Global Center of Attraction.

Positioning is Owning a word, a concept or a category in the Mind; it defines a brand, what it is and what it is not.

Meltem has developed service models to Clarify, Strengthen and Sustain a Strategic Positioning by synthesizing extensive research on the subject with more than 25 years of in-house experience spanning global companies to new ventures.

Her most important insight is that to create a Magnetic Brand, instead of wasting resources on popular tactics, a Clear Positioning has to be the centerpiece of all strategies.

With this in mind, she became the sole authorized Turkish partner of the inventor of Positioning, Al Ries and his daughter Laura Ries, to establish RIES Turkey and its solution partner Magnetic Brand.

Previously, she served as a top level executive in many different organizations from Fortune 500 companies (Unilever 15 years) to SMEs and Start-Ups, and led leading Global and Local brands.

Besides managing countless brands from Dove to Duru, Dalin, Cistus & Knauf and experiencing both B2C and B2B business models, playing a role in the transformation of family companies has contributed to her perspective today at least as much as her global company experience.

She has received various marketing awards throughout her career and has been named

one of the "Top 25 Marketers of Turkey" by Capital Magazine.

Meltem attended primary school in the USA, Israel & Turkey, spent 1 year in England while attending Üsküdar American Academy (2nd in class), and studied Management at METU (freshman) and Bosphorus University (10th in class, high honor student).

In addition to her formal education, she has attended countless global and local trainings.

“The Passion Test” of which she is a Certified Facilitator, is a key contributor to her models.

An obsessive reader, she is recently getting her feet wet writing, sharing her insights on her blog.

Besides creating concepts even in her spare time, her greatest pleasures are dancing and singing.

Born in 1971 in Ankara, Meltem is the mother of two children.

She hopes to be beneficial to her country by contributing to the Globalization of Turkish brands.

RiesTurkey.com | MagneticBrand.com.tr | MeltemHeper.com | GoingGlobing.com

“When You Are Clear, Miracles Happen”, Chris Attwood, Co-Founder of The Passion Test

Work Experience

Download CV

Jan 2020 - Present

Ankara, Turkey

Global Partner / Founder at RIES Turkey

RIES, The Positioning Pioneers

Sep 2010 - Present

Ankara, Turkey

Founder

Magnetic Brand

Nov 2017 - Nov 2018

Ankara, Turkey

Head of Regional Market Management

Knauf, Southern Europe, Africa, Middle East & South Asia

Dec 2014 - Feb 2016

Istanbul, Turkey

Chief Marketing Officer

Kopaş Cosmetics

Feb 2013 - Nov 2014

Istanbul, Turkey

Global Marketing Director

Evyap

Dec 2008 - Aug 2010

Istanbul, Turkey

General Manager

Groupe Bel Turkey

Mar 1993 - Sep 2008

Istanbul, Turkey

Marketing Director

Unilever (Local & Regional Responsibility, Global Brand Team Memberships)

Sep 1992 - Dec 1992

Istanbul, Turkey

Staff Consultant

Andersen Consulting (Now Accenture)

Chris Warmoth

Executive Vice President

Carlsberg Group

I worked with Meltem when I was on the Board of Evyap and Meltem was heading International Marketing.

She did an excellent job especially on Duru. She found a brand which was very fragmented, had no consistent positioning across variants and products, no consistent look and feel — and, despite starting from a very complex situation, she was able to find a way forward which truly created a brand. It’s one thing to create a brand from scratch — difficult in itself. It’s actually much harder to take a highly fragmented and inconsistent brand and create a brand from that. This all required Meltem to leverage her long experience on brands, her creativity in being able to map a way forward and her leadership to make it happen. It all happened in a short period of time. Meltem did similar work on other brands — with similar results.

She was always very good to deal with — had clear opinions, expressed her point of view well, was a good listener and was able to take multiple inputs and reflect them well.