MSC MARKETING SCIENCE

A Day in the Life of a Regional Media Strategist at Grab

If his parents had their way, Rohan Raman would be a scientist right now – not a newly-minted marketing professional. Mum and Dad were MSc graduates with science-related careers, and they had hoped their son would follow suit.

“I was fairly good at science back in high school, but it never really appealed to me,” Rohan admits. Instead, he gravitated towards the world of commerce. “It came as a shock to everyone in the family,” he recalls. “But for me, it was an absolute no-brainer.”

We sat down for a chat with Rohan at a pivotal moment of his working life: a few weeks away from concluding a Master’s Degree in Marketing Science (MMS) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU)’s Nanyang Business School (NBS). With a successful internship at Grab almost behind him, this is, as Rohan puts it, “the time of my life”.

A day in the life of a Grab intern

Southeast Asia’s leading super-app is arguably the best place to kick off a promising career in marketing. Rohan is finishing up his internship at GrabAds – the “discovery and growth engine for brands,” he explains.

This KPI-driven internship requires him to communicate with various in-house teams and external clients from Grab’s key markets in Southeast Asia. GrabAds internships are cross-functional, saddling interns with multiple responsibilities from editing presentation decks to tracking regional campaigns, encouraging them to learn, build, and execute.

“There’s so much to learn, not just internally, but also from the clients,” Rohan tells us. “I’m not just working with people inside GrabAds, but also with GrabMart, GrabPay, Merchants, Commercial, Business Development, Measurement, and Agency Partner teams.

The internship has given Rohan a front-row seat at the epicentre of a billion-dollar company operating throughout Southeast Asia

“A lot of my responsibilities include staying in touch with operations in different countries, not just in Singapore,” Rohan explains.

“You’re trying to figure out what the country teams have been up to, and how we can help from a regional perspective.”

On the third day of his internship, Rohan jumped into what he calls a “massive two-day workshop with one of the biggest toy companies in the world,” including dozens of people from Grab and the client.

“It’s amazing – you get to interact with top management and leaders from your client brands,” Rohan recalls. “It was exactly what I needed to get an insight into how GrabAds works.”

Grab’s stimulating work environment

Grab interns like Rohan are treated like fulltime colleagues. “Samba, my gem of a boss, introduces me as an associate everywhere – my responsibilities are not that of an intern for sure,” Rohan tells us. “The entire team acknowledges it, because they know the work you’re putting in is more than what you’re supposed to be doing.”

And like Grab’s fulltime associates, interns are expected to think fast on their feet and act accordingly. “There is a massive learning curve regarding how fast things move in Grab,” Rohan tells us. “You must always be in the loop; if you miss anything, you’re already behind everyone else.”

Grab’s communicative company culture has helped Rohan stay ahead of the curve. “The only way to get stuff done is to understand it, and the only way to understand it is by asking,” Rohan says. In practice, this means he can lean on almost anyone in the organisation for help. “I can text anybody at any time, irrespective of how high up they are,” Rohan reveals. “They’re always willing to help.”

After hours, the work environment allows Grab colleagues to blow off steam through casual get-togethers, giving Rohan the room to explore his musical side. During a launch party for a new Grab service, Rohan allowed himself and a colleague to be dragged up on stage to perform for attendees.

“There was a guitarist and me, and we just kept it really simple – playing crowd-pleasers like Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive, Creep by Radiohead, and She Will be Loved by Maroon Five,” Rohan recalls.

Cross-pollination of ideas

His stint at Grab may have been predestined. Grab had been the subject of a project Rohan tackled in his MSc Marketing Science (MMS) programme at NTU’s Nanyang Business School (NBS). In fact, the project’s moderator ended up as Rohan’s hiring manager in Grab.

“I already knew what the company did before my internship, because I put in so much research,” Rohan recalls. “The stuff we did in the internship’s first three weeks, I had done two months prior because of that project.”

NBS’s (new approach) experiential learning approach appealed to his strengths as a marketer. “We had so many case studies, presentations, and real-world projects involving real brands,” Rohan recalls. His class cohort – filled with similarly intelligent marketing professionals-to-be – also helped Rohan internalise the programme’s content.

“We were always learning new perspectives, meeting new people from different countries,” Rohan tells us.

The multitude of opinions and free-flowing discussions led to a healthy cross-pollination of ideas that bore fruit by the third semester.

“You assume less about the markets, because you hear people talking about their own markets and countries,” Rohan tells us. “In the end, there are fewer assumptions, more experience-based insights, and more people to whom you can now reach out if you have questions about their market.”

Rohan’s post-MMS potential

Once he graduates from the MMS programme by January 2023, Rohan feels he’ll be ready to apply his creative and analytical skills to the real world.

Goal One is to find a career that marries his creative and analytical sides. “I believe that Rohan is divided into marketing and music. There’s nothing else,” he explains.

“It would be a dream to work in the music industry as a marketer, because I’ll be able to bring a lot more to the table from both aspects.”

Rohan offers a few tips for success for potential MMS students following in his footsteps. First, MMS students should know exactly what they’re getting into – “not just in terms of the curriculum, but in terms of what your career plans are, the countries you want to work in, the markets that you want to find jobs in,” Rohan says. “The MMS course shows you where the doors are. A lot of doors! But you’ve got to open those doors yourself.”

Finally, Rohan advises MMS students to respect the post-graduation effort and hustle. “I’m not taking anything away from NTU – fantastic university, fantastic course. The reason I’m at Grab is NTU. But the rest is hard work.”

As Rohan prepares to graduate from the MMS programme, he surveys his own options – the path forward is clear. “There’s nothing set in stone, but the plan remains the same. Marketing. Marketing. Marketing.”

Find out more about the MSc Marketing Science programme here.

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