Marketing Strategist
I’ve spent more than two decades figuring out why some marketing works and some just creates more work.
I’m Dina Sultan, a marketing strategist and former Intuit marketing leader. I’ve built brands, launched products and led marketing across different industries, markets and stages of growth.
The best marketing starts with understanding the problem first.
My experience changed the questions I ask.
Early in my career, I thought good marketing was about finding the right idea and executing it well. And sometimes it is.
But the longer I worked in marketing, the more I realized that the hardest problems rarely sit neatly inside marketing.
A campaign can’t fix unclear positioning. More content won’t help if you’re talking to the wrong customer. Better creative can’t make disconnected channels work together. And acquiring more customers doesn’t mean much if you can’t keep them.
So I stopped starting with the tactic.
Now I start with the business, the customer and the problem we’re actually trying to solve.
Then we decide what marketing needs to do.
Where I’ve been
More than two decades of marketing across brands, industries and markets.
My career has taken me across North America, Middle East, and international markets, from agencies and global brands to fintech, SaaS, hospitality, tourism, healthcare, the public sector and growing businesses.
Along the way, I’ve worked across brand, growth, lifecycle, content, social, communications and integrated marketing.
My perspective was global long before my career was.
I’ve spent much of my life moving between countries and cultures. I grew up between Damascus, California and the Middle East, spent my first year of university in Switzerland, lived in Beirut, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, built a big part of my career in Toronto, and now call Barcelona home.
Living in different places taught me early that people don’t all think, communicate or make decisions in the same way. What feels obvious in one market can land completely differently in another.
That made me curious about people, culture and behaviour long before I started using words like customer insight and segmentation at work.
It’s also why I’m still fascinated by marketing across borders: how brands travel, how ideas get interpreted differently and why understanding the person on the other side matters more than blindly following a playbook.
I think that perspective has made me a better marketer.
Ideas worth thinking about.
