As marketing manager for Piaggio, Nicoletta Roselli has to be especially creative – here she reviews an ever growing role and explains the qualities needed for it
How did you get into the industry?
I have always been fascinated with aviation. I just love flying and I am planning to get my pilot's licence this year. In 2001, Piaggio was a young, growing company and they were looking for someone able to speak Italian, so I started working there as a strategic planner for the president.
What does your job involve?
My main area of responsibility is to manage marketing and sales support for the company – creating ads for magazines and different marketing material for brochures, trade shows and so on. I market the P180 in the USA, Canada and Mexico.
This year has been especially exciting with Piaggio launching a new aircraft – the Avanti II. Until now I have been marketing existing successful products, and now the new version of it means I have to come up with more creative marketing tools.
Working for a young company means you get more responsibility – and more worries in a way – but more excitement, because everyone is directly participating in making the company successful.
What are the rewards and challenges of the job?
I work with a lot of people with a lot of experience and I am learning a lot from them. Not everybody can have that technical background, but if you have the interest, you can learn every day and that's what I am doing – not just knowing what the product does, but why it does it.
The most interesting part of the job is meeting so many different types of people from throughout the industry. There is also a lot of travel involved – mainly across the USA – in my job, but I have also been to Mexico.
What is your advice to people looking to get into a similar role?
You need good interpersonal skills – I have to deal with people every day and if you can't do that, you will find it difficult.
Even if you don't have a ton of pure aviation experience, you can make up for it with other skills. But you have to be passionate about it, otherwise it all just ends up sounding like a bunch of numbers and technical explanations.
We definitely need more women in aviation. Even though it has traditionally been a male environment, I hope more women will join in different departments.
Some women may think they can only get into the industry in secretarial or traditional roles, but you can be anything from a pilot to the head of engineering these days. You can get where you want if you have the drive.
- flight.workingweek@rbi.co.uk
Roselli: "We definitely need more women in aviation"
Source: Flight International
