Arfa Hussain

The best career advice I ever received was from my grandfather. He told me, you need to love what you're doing, or if you don't like what you're doing, don't do it at all. And if you love something, just give your 100%, give your 200%, but just deep dive into what you love, and you don't have to compromise when it comes to your career. Of course, there are times you may not get certain opportunities in life that you really want to grab or you really want to do. But make sure that the things that you really want to do, just work really hard for it, because one day, it will happen. It's just like one day or day one.

One advice that I would genuinely love to give to younger women who are entering into marketing would be to just be themselves and be ready for the ups and downs. Marketing is not an easy field because there are a lot of times when the clients push back, when there are a lot of back and forth with your internal teams. Working in marketing agencies can be really tough because you're not just working as a sole contractor - you're working with your teams, your design teams, then you have your managers, and then you have the clients at the other end. You have to coordinate a lot, and it's a big responsibility because it's a really cross-collaborative role. You have to constantly collaborate with different teams across different departments. So one advice that I would give to these younger women would be to just be aligned with what they are doing, and just love what they do, and I think they'll just make it out alive.

When it comes to challenges, I feel like different people in this industry have different perceptions, different ideologies, and a different style of working. So when a lot of different creative people come together, they have their own way and approach of doing things, so it can be challenging sometimes when you have to go back and forth with different people who want to take a different approach for working on a campaign or working on a marketing idea. There's a lot of back and forth, and you have to align a lot of things with them, and you have to make sure that we're on the same page and that the campaign is aligned, taking the base idea or the original idea for the campaign. As far as opportunities are concerned, it's such a creative field - you get to be in an industry where you can dip your feet in every other industry, basically. If you're in marketing, you get to work with financial clients, healthcare clients, travel clients, lifestyle clients, technical clients, fashion brands. You're working on different types of content - technical content, lifestyle content, fashion brands. So there are different industries that you get to explore and work with, and that's a really good opportunity while working in such an industry.

Being in such an industry, you have to be really accountable and really responsible for what you are producing in terms of content. Anything or everything that goes out - if you're editing the content, if you're publishing the content - you have to make sure that the content is factually correct, and you have to make sure that you're not hurting someone's sentiments. You have to make sure that the tone, the brand tonality and the brand identity are aligned, and you have to make sure that no one's sentiments are getting hurt by the tone that you're using in your words. I feel like you have to be really authentic, and you have to be really accountable and responsible. You have to know what you're doing when you work with certain brands, because every brand has a different brand tone, and a brand identity, and a brand positioning. So I feel like you have to be aligned with the different brand identities for different kinds of brands.