Marketer of the month
Who is WANGECHI GITAHI ?
Wangechi Gitahi is Head of Marketing at Nile Breweries Limited, a role she stepped into in June 2025 at a company mid-reset. The brief that came with the title went well beyond selling beer: rebuild the connection between one of Uganda’s most storied brewers and the people who reach for it every weekend. In practice, that means she now oversees brand strategy, innovation and consumer engagement across the company’s full beer, cider and spirits portfolio ,everything from reviving heritage brands to building entirely new categories from the ground up.
She joined at a pointed moment for the business. AB InBev, Nile Breweries’ parent, had just refreshed its Uganda leadership bench after a difficult stretch, and it wanted executives who could bring outside FMCG discipline into the building without losing the operational rigor the business runs on. Gitahi was part of that bet, and a year and a half in, the early scorecard award-winning creative, a heritage beer reclaiming its cultural relevance, a viral sampling campaign, and a new spirits category launched from scratch ,suggests it’s paying off.
The experience of WANGECHI GITAHI
Gitahi didn’t arrive at Nile Breweries to learn the trade on the job; she came having already spent more than fifteen years in it. Most of that time was at Unilever, across East Africa’s fast-moving consumer goods industry, where she rose to lead Category and Trade Marketing for the region running strategy and growth across Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda simultaneously. It’s the kind of role that teaches a marketer two things at once: how to build a story that travels across borders, and how to make sure that story still lands when a shopper is standing in front of a shelf with about three seconds to decide. That combination of storytelling instinct and shopper-level pragmatism has followed her into every campaign she’s led since.
At Nile Breweries, that experience has shown up across several distinct wins. Club Pilsener’s radio campaign, “A Lesson in Ugandan Efficiency,” made with creative agency TBWA Uganda, swept the 2025 Silverback Awards, taking Silver in Radio and a Craft Gold besides, on the strength of humour that felt genuinely Ugandan rather than translated from somewhere else. Nile Special, the company’s flagship beer, was named Best Alcoholic Brand at the 2025 People’s Choice Quality Awards and separately recognised as Uganda’s Most Admired Alcoholic Beverage Brand at the Brand Africa 100 awards honours she has consistently redirected toward the brand’s drinkers rather than claimed for her team.
In May 2026, she proved she could build hype from a standing start, too. Castle Lite’s “Try It Ahhh” Challenge turned a cryptic online teaser — Ugandans guessing for days what “Ahhh” even meant into a nationwide sampling movement built around the brand’s signature extra-cold serve. The campaign launched at Meraki Karting in Bugolobi, with brand ambassador Spice Diana drawing crowds into the activation, and the curiosity it generated online confirmed for the team that there was an opportunity to build something participatory and culturally relevant.
That same year, she led the company into Uganda’s spirits market for the first time with the launch of Kyooto Waragi, entering a category long troubled by counterfeits and unsafe informal alternatives. Her positioning leaned hard into trust rather than glamour: a double-seal system and an embedded authenticity stamp so drinkers could check, with their own eyes, that what they were holding was real, launched to guests at Kampala’s Ndere Cultural Centre.
Additional Information
Gitahi’s sense of what marketing is for doesn’t stop at the strategy table. She is a certified life coach and a mentor with Girls for Girls, and she founded Octovine, a consultancy focused on purpose-led coaching, brand strategy and business transformation ,work she carries alongside her corporate role, not after it. It rounds out a picture of someone who treats brand-building and people-building as versions of the same skill: understanding what someone actually needs before you try to give them anything.
She has also extended her brand-building instincts into cultural partnerships beyond core campaigns including Nile Special’s long-running backing of Ugandan rugby, engagement ahead of the Rugby Africa Cup and the Webb Ellis Cup Tour, and Castle Lite’s FIFA World Cup 2026 activation, which moved through Jinja, Gulu and Mbarara before closing out in Kampala.
Academic Qualifications
Among her various qualifications,Gitahi is a Chartered Marketer (MCIM), a credential from the Chartered Institute of Marketing that sits quietly behind her name in company communications but signals the formal grounding underneath campaigns that otherwise read as pure instinct.