Marketer of the month
Who is ELIZABETH MUTAMULIZA ?
There is a particular kind of marketer who never quite gets the credit their work deserves, because the work itself is designed to disappear into experience.
You don’t remember the brand strategy behind a great marathon weekend in Kasese; you remember the mist over the Rwenzori peaks, the cold beer waiting at the finish line, the sense that something in your own life had, for one weekend, gotten a little bigger.
That kind of invisibility is, in its own way, the highest compliment a marketer can be paid,and it is exactly the terrain Elizabeth Mutamuliza has built her reputation on.
For September, Evolve Africa names her Marketer of the Month.
Mutamuliza is Marketing Manager for the Beer Category at Uganda Breweries Limited, a role that puts her at the centre of one of the most competitive shelves in Ugandan retail. It is not an easy category to stand out in beer marketing across the region tends toward the interchangeable, all sunsets and celebration and interchangeable slogans about brotherhood. What has set her work apart is a refusal to settle for that shorthand, and a willingness to bet brand budget on ideas that take years, not weeks, to prove themselves.
The experience of ELIZABETH MUTAMULIZA
Mutamuliza’s route to the top of Uganda Breweries’ beer marketing function did not begin in a boardroom. It began on the trade floor, in the unglamorous work of distributorship management and territory development, as a Customer Relations Representative at East African Breweries Limited in 2010 an entry point that gave her an early, ground-level understanding of how a beverage brand actually reaches the person holding the bottle, long before she was ever responsible for what that bottle said about itself.
From there, her path took a deliberate detour through the agency and media side of the business, the kind of move that tends to sharpen a marketer’s instincts even when it doesn’t look like career progression on paper.
A stint as Business Development Manager at IPS Kenya in Nairobi was followed by two years as a Media Manager at WPP-Scangroup’s SCANAD Uganda, where she would have sat on the other side of the client relationship pitching, planning and buying the very campaigns that brand managers dream up.
It is a vantage point that few brand-side marketers get, and it shows in the discipline with which she now approaches channel strategy.
She carried that agency grounding back into corporate brand management at Pepsi Uganda, first as Media Manager and then, from December 2018, as Brand Manager for Pepsi and Mountain Dew, her first sustained experience owning the full strategy for a portfolio of consumer brands rather than just their media plans.
That experience proved to be the direct rehearsal for what came next.
In January 2021, Mutamuliza moved to Uganda Breweries Limited as Brand Manager for Premium Beers, a role she held for four years and one that placed her at the centre of the company’s most closely watched brand portfolio.
The move paid off: in November 2024 she stepped up to Acting Marketing Manager for the Beer Category, tasked with developing and executing the category strategy to grow the business and deliver on its objectives, before the acting was dropped and the role made permanent in February 2025 the position and the mandate, she holds today
Additional Information
Contribution to Brands and Industry
The clearest evidence of that patience is the Tusker Lite Mt Rwenzori Marathon, which marked its fifth anniversary this year under Mutamuliza’s stewardship of the Tusker Lite brand. The race began in September 2022 as an unproven gamble, a destination marathon through the foothills of the Rwenzori Mountains, developed in partnership with tour operator Equator Hikes, that drew roughly 800 runners into a debut edition battered by rain and mud.
Rather than smooth over that difficulty in the marketing, Mutamuliza’s team let it become part of the race’s identity: a marathon that asked something real of the people who ran it.
The results have compounded year on year. Participation has grown into thousands. All four race distances have since been certified by World Athletics, and the 2026 fifth-anniversary edition achieved Label Status and a place on the World Athletics Calendar, a recognition reserved for events meeting international benchmarks in route quality, athlete experience and organisation. Independent research from Makerere University’s Tourism Research & Development Centre has put the event’s single-edition economic injection into Kasese in the billions of shillings, and the sponsor roster has grown to include the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities, Britam Insurance and Kia, among others.
For Mutamuliza, the achievement has always been framed less as a campaign win than as proof of a broader philosophy about what brand investment should do
Marking the fifth edition, her team set out to create more than just a race. They wanted to build an experience that brings people together through sport, adventure and lifestyle. It is a rare thing in FMCG marketing to watch a stated ambition and its measurable outcome line up this closely, five years apart.
The marathon is the headline case study, but it sits inside a broader repositioning of Tusker Lite, from a straightforward low-carb lager into a brand built around active lifestyles and shared adventure, a shift that has made the brand a recurring reference point in conversations about experiential marketing and sports tourism in East Africa
Academic Qualifications
Among her various academic qualifications, Mutamuliza holds a bachelor of International Business Administration (BBA),Marketing from United States International University-Africa and a Master of Arts(MA),Advertising and Marketing from University of Leeds