‘Women to Watch: Women Who Make a Difference’ ceremony was held at Swissotel The Bosphorus, Istanbul.
Çiçek Uyansoy is the General Manager of Nokia, a brand that has achieved Lovemark status for the past five consecutive years. According to Uyansoy, life is an art of problem solving, while the most important virtue in one’s professional life is hard work.
Çiçek Uyansoy, Nokia Turkey, General Manager
Thanks to smartphones, the already-arduous battle that exists in the cell phone category has become all the more difficult. Brands in this category are launching new devices and features one after the other, and drawing up partnerships with GSM operators to always be one step ahead of the competition. But according to MediaCat’s Lovemarks research (published since 2007), the same brand has ranked at the top for the past five years: Nokia. In fact, Nokia isn’t just the leading brand of its own category: based on its score, it’s the most-liked among all brands.
The General Manager of Nokia Turkey since 2011, Çiçek Uyansoy not only helped the brand maintain its place in the heart of the consumer; she also took the company up a notch with her management of Nokia’s relaunch with its Lumia brand.
“Organizing the Nokia Lumia launch, which could be seen as the relaunch of the Nokia brand, as well as managing the entry of Lumia products into the Turkish market through marketing and sales activities, was my favorite recent project,” says Uyansoy, evidently happy about Lumia’s trajectory. She emphasizes that she loves seeing the growth of the Lumia family and that it gives her hope.
Uyansoy openly admits that she didn’t even consider the job she has today when she took the first steps of her career; yet after some time, she began to feel that she could reach her current position.
“I look at the period between when I first started work and when I became general manager as a learning process. Because when you become general manager, you need to know what each department does, to see the whole that emerges from their parts, to understand the whole correctly and to manage it. My having worked in different departments helped me better understand both the relationships with people abroad and with Nokias around the world, as well as the method of doing work domestically. So I think this was a very healthy process,” says Uyansoy. She believes that every position comes with a specific set of required experiences and that she has obtained these experiences over time.
According to Uyansoy, the critical asset in one’s professional life is hard work: “Life in general is an art of problem solving, and the same thing applies to one’s professional life on a smaller scale. Not giving up when faced with challenges, making good observations as well as developing a visionary outlook and way of thinking can get rid of all the obstacles in your way,” Uyansoy says, adding that there is no end to education – that everyone should pursue continuous professional advancement.
“Life in general is an art of problem solving, and the same thing applies to one’s professional life, but on a smaller scale.”
