Meet the marketing grad who became a CEO, innovation leader & mentor

Sponsored by Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola

Bruna is a marketing graduate from Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola.

She is also the CEO of her own start up, Lulú La Academia – a virtual school dedicated to empowering parents with children who live with learning disabilities. That’s in addition to being a marketing and innovation leader at Danper, a major agricultural export company, and marketing mentor at Acción Emprendedora, an organisation of volunteers dedicated to providing low income entrepreneurs with the marketing, finance and managerial operations knowledge they need to help them succeed.

TopUniversities spoke with Bruna to find out more about her inspiring career journey so far, and how her marketing degree has equipped her with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed.

Hi Bruna! What was the motivation behind Lulú La Academia? Can you tell us a bit about it?

My main motivation is my family. My younger brother, Gianluca, suffers from intellectual impairment and autistic traits, and so I know how difficult it is to have a family member living with a disability.

Since I was a little girl, I dreamed about having an initiative that helps families with kids who live with a disability. Peru is a country where 10 percent of the population has a learning disability, which is why I wanted to do something to help.

I won an innovation contest in 2019 which gave me the opportunity to visit Silicon Valley and find out more about the entrepreneurial ecosystem. When I was there I received one of the best pieces of advice from a social entrepreneur: “When you want to develop a start up, start thinking about the real problems that surround you, and there you will find a business idea.”

I then went back to Peru and that’s how Lulú La Academia was born.

What are your hopes for the future of Lulú La Academia?

My vision is to rapidly expand our range of lessons and programs to accommodate as many parents and children as possible. We would also like to expand to other countries in Latin America.

We’ve also decided to start tackling education-related problems. We understand there are plenty of difficulties for families including emotional problems, economic problems and health problems, and I dream that in the future we can help them with innovative solutions for those situations.

What advice would you give to someone who’s hoping to start their own business like you have with Lulú La Academia?

To be truly human-centered, to look for real problems, and, when you find it, fall in love with the problem not with the solution. There can be plenty of different solutions for the same problem, so be open to change; everything will change as many times as needed to generate real value for your clients.

Start soon, start now, start testing, start talking with your users, start building. At Lulú we started as a community of emotional support for mothers with children living with disabilities. The creation of Lulú La Academia was born as a solution to a problem that we identified in a WhatsApp group.

Choose your team, choose people with different skills, choose hardworking people, but especially choose those who have the same motivations as you. At Lulú, the four of us have people in our families living with disabilities, and that is why we care so much about this project – we have the same purpose.

Can you also tell us a bit about your roles as an innovation leader and marketing mentor?

I’m responsible for the brand strategy, innovation and communicational campaigns. Because of my work at Danper over the last 18 months, I was nominated for an award at the Women Marketeers Awards 2020 by the Peruvian Marketing Society and became the youngest executive to be nominated in the FMCG category.

At Acción Emprendedora, I’m part of a three-member team of mentors: marketing, financial and operations. Together, we help entrepreneurs in vulnerable situations to improve their business. Our work includes, but is not limited to, creating their brand, business strategy, defining a portfolio of products and identifying the cost of the operations with the final goal of finding, tracking and improving their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of the business.

How do you think your experience studying marketing at Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola has helped you achieve so much and get you to where you are today?

I think studying marketing at Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola has given me a lot. It helped me develop the marketing and business foundations required to face the real world, not only as an entrepreneur but also an executive in corporate companies.

It also helped me develop soft skills like effective communication, analysis, creativity, teamwork and leadership as the courses have been created to encourage self-learning and collaborative work.

In addition, because of the excellent teaching staff, I felt challenged throughout my studies and encouraged by the teachers to give my best and discover my own potential. I’m still in touch with my favourite professors, and I sometimes ask them for professional advice and mentorship.

Can you give some examples of how you have applied what you learnt during your marketing degree to what you do today with Lulú La Academia, Danper and Acción Emprendedora?

Studying marketing at Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola means that you learn to be a human-centered professional – someone who puts your customer at the heart of your decisions. I was so amazed to learn about this mindset that I decided to start my career in market research and gain a deeper understanding of people’s motivations, needs, insights and how brands can connect with them and create business opportunities.

This way of understanding marketing, that Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola taught me, has helped me to become an empathic and sensitive marketeer; that’s my personal stamp, and that guides every project I begin, like being a social entrepreneur with Lulú La Academia, being the innovation and marketing leader in a big company, or being a mentor for a fellow entrepreneur.

Lead image credit: Revista Somos – El Comercio