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As strategic marketing lead for Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Ana Archbold is responsible for setting and executing the broader strategy for the company’s Self-Care and Wellness division in the U.S. The portfolio consists of five brands, which Dr. Reddy’s is striving to expand. Additionally, she leads two women’s health brands, Premama Wellness and MenoLabs. These are both women’s health startups acquired in the past two years. Through these brands the company is working to provide women with options to improve their health through key parts of life — the conception journey and the journey to and through menopause.
Q: Can you give us a little information on your background before you joined Dr. Reddy’s?
ARCHBOLD: I started my career in advertising, working for McCann-Erickson. Advertising is a great foundation for your career. To be successful in that industry, you have to work well with a very diverse team. You must balance a dynamic spectrum of client needs and internal needs. I really enjoyed the opportunity to create consumer delight through storytelling and grow brands. After a few years, I wanted to shift my career to have a greater impact on the business end to end. This interest in the bigger picture of business and brand building motivated me to pursue my MBA from the University of Michigan. My objective was to build a global marketing career, and I chose to start this next chapter at Unilever. While at Unilever, I had the opportunity to work in global strategy and local P&L roles. This included a four-year assignment in the U.K., leading global innovation and strategy. I came back to the United States for a job with Johnson & Johnson’s Consumer Health business. While at J&J, I first worked in marketing on skin health brands, including Neutrogena and Aveeno, turning around stagnant categories and reinvigorating growth for the brands. From there I expanded my leadership scope to sales and led customer strategy for Listerine and an innovation group within the company’s Self-Care division.
Q: Can you go into the women’s health business a little more?
ARCHBOLD: Consumers have changed their perspective on health because of the pandemic. Health is much more proactive now, rather than reactive. Consumers are stepping up and advocating for their needs. They are also focused on improving their longevity and moving into greater vitality as they age. We’re seeing greater interest in women’s health, in particular women wanting to take the right steps for themselves. These consumers emphasize the need for better information and education, as well as having science-based products and solutions to help them. This is exactly what Dr. Reddy’s wants to lean into, and we’re part of making sure that our businesses are being responsive to the consumer and helping to anticipate a woman’s needs.
Q: So, the next question is, what do you find most challenging about what you do?
ARCHBOLD: Our business is quite large and diverse. We have an O-T-C business with three brands as well as the women’s wellness business. Within O-T-C we have a back pain brand, a smoking cessation brand and a brand called Healthcare Aisle that covers a variety of consumer needs in terms of O-T-C, everything from gastrointestinal to allergy. We are on a mission to improve consumer health across these brands, with urgency — our company’s motto is “Good health can’t wait.” So, we are looking for solutions for consumer health that tie back to this portfolio, which includes a broad spectrum of consumers and their needs. The diversity of brands that makes this role infinitely interesting is also at the heart of the biggest challenge — propelling growth across the full portfolio.
Q: In your role now, how many people do you oversee, and can you describe how you interact with them?
ARCHBOLD: I have six direct reports, only one of which is based in the Princeton office with me. The rest of my team is in Connecticut, Nevada, Arizona and D.C. The team has a good spirit of trust and is incredibly supportive of each other. We do have weekly business reviews where we connect as a full team. Beyond that, our connectivity is pretty frequent, due to the nature of our relationships and the demands of a digital-first business. Dr. Reddy’s consumer health businesses are mostly D2C and Amazon. So, if there’s a challenge with a channel, most likely it’s a channel we can influence quickly. The very nature of that business means we’re very much in touch all the time, making sure that we’re solving the consumer issues either as they come up or trying to stay ahead of them.
Q: Are these meetings virtual, or are some in person?
ARCHBOLD: It’s a mix of in-person and virtual for my total role, but for the rest of my team on women’s wellness, we’re virtual. We really rely on technology. I also connect with team members at Dr. Reddy’s headquarters in India, making sure best practices are being shared, that we are working in tandem on our strategies and innovation.
Q: From what you’ve said, you interact with retailers as well.
ARCHBOLD: The primary retailer for two of the businesses I run is Amazon. We have our own digital storefront and then we have Amazon. Additionally, our products like Doan’s and Habitrol are available in brick-and-mortar retailers including Walmart and CVS.
Q: Since so much of your background and what you do now is focused on marketing, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share on the future of health care marketing?
ARCHBOLD: Consumer health since COVID has changed drastically. People are looking for science-backed solutions. They are creating the wellness routine or regimen that is right for them, based on the science that they understand. Health care has now gone from being more reactive to much more proactive and holistic. People understand that care goes beyond responding to an issue, but also going to the root cause and prevention. And for that reason, our portfolio now spans various lines of products that range from helping people undo their nicotine addiction with smoking cessation all the way through to Premama, which is a product that helps ensure that you’re healthy when you start to plan to conceive your child and start your family.
Q: What makes Dr. Reddy’s a unique company to work for?
ARCHBOLD: We believe in deep partnership and collaboration, internally and even externally. Working at Dr. Reddy’s has given me a different perspective on how business can be done. Yes, it’s a multibillion-dollar business, but it remains entrepreneurial. Additionally, so much of our success is created through partnerships. This is a company that really works to collaborate in a very different way than other organizations where I’ve worked, and its collaboration is both internal and external. So that for me has been a much different way of working, particularly with the external stakeholder’s growth.
From a culture perspective, I have found it to be an incredibly inclusive and diverse environment. I really felt welcomed when I joined Dr. Reddy’s, and I feel like there is a deep respect for diversity within the organization. The people I work with are really fantastic, and I happen to work for one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked for — Ashish Girotra, Business Head, Self Care and Wellness. This is an organization that really values continuous learning and being entrepreneurial. Our leadership, Ashish especially, has invested a lot of time in getting to know this space and ensured that the teams have the training and the exposure that they need to be successful. I think this is becoming rarer in organizations, to see that level of intense people development.
