Vice President of Integrated Communications at
Redken, New York
Family: Married, with a three-year-old daughter
and another on the way
Greatest Career Accomplishment: “Step one,
developing an incredibly integrated team at
Redken who always think about the 360 degrees
of marketing. Our media, Internet and public
relations teams all depend on each other’s
areas to optimize their success. Step two, building the credibility of the department. I took it
from a department that only bought pages in
a magazine or helped at press events into one
that yielded results and affected sales.”
Defining Moment: “Becoming a mother has
shaped who I am at home and at work. My
daughter is in her ‘why’ phase, constantly asking me, ‘Why, mommy?’ It’s taught me that we
constantly need to be asking why can’t we, for
instance, engage with the consumer more?”
paid more attention to how people were
finding us and what words they were
using to discover Redken,” says Kalyani.
“You have to stay on top of search engine
marketing. We do a lot of events offline,
in salons and especially Fashion Week,
and people remember Redken. We need
to remember this when paying for search
engine key words.”
For example, Redken made fashionable
the “posh ponytail” at last year’s Fashion
Week. And after the show, people were
searching for information on the hairstyle
online. “Not buying that key word was a
lost opportunity,” Kalyani contends.
The Future of Social Networking
Interactive, though already important, is still a growing sector for Redken.
With more and more consumers spending time online and on social networks,
Kalyani says it is important for a company to not only have a Web site, but
to build it into an entire experience for
the customer. “We take the interactive
space very seriously and know it’s vital
to growing our business,” she says. “We
encourage our team to make sure they
are up on new technologies and trends
by attending conferences and being
involved in the interactive communities
either online or face-to-face.”
Kalyani adds Redken has the strong-est Web site in the haircare industry:
it has earned two Webby awards and,
recently, Redken won an interactive
award for urbanexperiment.com. She does
recognize that Redken has not been
involved enough with online communities and social networks. “We have been
experimenting with social networks like
Facebook the past couple of months, and
you will see more efforts in the second
half of this year and into 2009.” ■
