Who Am I

The Professional

Noaman Ashraf is a seasoned business leader with over two decades of experience driving growth, transformation, and market expansion across FMCG, startups, and purpose-driven organizations, spanning Pakistan, Africa, and the Middle East.

His professional journey began at Unilever, where he was part of the Marketing Development function and worked on strategic category evaluations, large-scale consumer research initiatives, and cross-functional business strategy development. This early exposure laid the foundation for a career defined by structured thinking, consumer insight, and disciplined execution.

He went on to spend more than seven years at Searle Pakistan and International Brands, progressing from Assistant Brand Manager to Group Brand Manager. During this period, he led sustained category leadership and large-scale turnarounds across food, confectionery, and health brands. His work included repositioning Canderel to sustained market dominance, reclaiming and scaling the Wrigley business after a distributor transition, reviving declining portfolios, and launching premium global brands in Pakistan through national visibility programs, retail activations, and consumer engagement initiatives.

At Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan, Noaman served as Customer Marketing Manager, where he established and professionalized the company’s Trade Marketing function. He transformed key accounts operations, expanded national retail reach, and executed high-impact retail and activation programs that delivered significant volume uplifts while strengthening long-term brand presence. His work reshaped how the organization approached customer marketing, merchandising, and in-store execution.

His career then took a distinctly international turn. As Director Marketing at Marsavco (formerly Unilever) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the largest FMCG companies in Central Africa, he held responsibility for a portfolio of more than 20 brands across home care, personal care, foods, and cosmetics. Operating in a complex, recessionary market, he reduced marketing spend by nearly half while delivering strong volume growth, outpacing category benchmarks, and instituting foundational systems such as the first retail census and audit panel in the market. He also led major brand relaunches and strengthened route-to-market execution, modern trade development, and organizational capability.

Subsequently, as Branch Manager for Bliss Brands in Zambia, Noaman took on full country responsibility, overseeing business setup, sales, marketing, distribution, hiring, and operations. This role gave him end-to-end ownership of performance — from market entry and team building to supply chain coordination and commercial execution — further deepening his general management exposure.

He later joined Henkel Arabia as Country Business Manager for Pakistan, where he was tasked with establishing Henkel’s Home & Laundry Care business under an exclusive distribution model. He designed and executed the national market entry strategy, built local teams, secured distribution across key cities, and led trade marketing programs that established Henkel’s presence in a highly competitive FMCG landscape.

Later Noaman joined the Hilal Group, where he played a pivotal role in building and scaling Hilal Care, the group’s home and personal. As Head of Marketing, he helped launch the business from the ground up, drove rapid multi-year growth, expanded the portfolio from one to five categories, conceived and launched multiple new brands, and institutionalized long-term innovation and business planning. Later, as Head of Marketing & Trade Marketing for Shalimar Food Products, he was entrusted with reviving dormant brands, including the relaunch of Tulsi after a multi-year hiatus, and expanding the portfolio through new brand introductions.

Most recently, he served as Marketing Head at The Dawood Foundation, leading marketing across a diverse portfolio that included the MagnifiScience Center, cultural initiatives, and public engagement platforms. His work spanned brand activations, digital transformation, large-scale events, partnerships, and national visibility campaigns — blending commercial rigor with social impact.

Across roles, industries, and geographies, Noaman’s professional career has been defined by one consistent thread: building performance — of brands, businesses, teams, and systems — in complex, real-world environments.

The Teacher

Alongside his corporate leadership journey, Noaman Ashraf has remained deeply engaged with teaching and learning for nearly fifteen years.

He has served as visiting faculty at several leading institutions, teaching undergraduate and postgraduate marketing courses, and working closely with young professionals and executives to bridge theory with real-world application. His teaching experience spans universities including IBA Karachi, Hamdard University, PAF-KIET, IQRA University, and KASBIT.

Currently, he teaches at the Center for Executive Education (CEE) at IBA Karachi, where he works with experienced professionals and leaders, helping them think more clearly about strategy, brands, markets, and decision-making in complex environments.

Teaching, for Noaman, has never been a side pursuit. It has been a parallel discipline — one that sharpened his ability to simplify complexity, communicate with clarity, and understand how adults actually learn, unlearn, and change. The classroom became a testing ground where ideas were refined, assumptions were challenged, and frameworks were stress-tested against real questions from real practitioners.

This sustained engagement with education fundamentally shaped how he approaches training, facilitation, and inner work — not as information transfer, but as structured learning that leads to insight, application, and lasting capability.

The Trainer & Inner Game Architect

Over time, Noaman's work moved beyond external performance — into the internal conditions that shape how people think, decide, act, and sustain results.

As a lifelong learner, he invested deeply in the study of human behavior, performance psychology, emotional intelligence, and mind–body modalities, training with globally recognized institutions and practitioners. This learning was not pursued in isolation, nor as an alternative career path, but as a way to understand what traditional business tools often fail to address: the internal constraints, patterns, and identities that quietly govern performance.

He is professionally trained and certified across multiple disciplines, including advanced Neuro-Linguistic Programming, hypnosis, emotional intelligence assessment, coaching methodologies, and stress-regulation approaches. These disciplines form the technical foundation of his work, enabling him to operate confidently at the intersection of mindset, emotion, identity, and execution.

Today, Noaman designs and delivers high-impact keynotes, immersive workshops, and practical seminars for corporate audiences, leadership teams, professionals, and individuals seeking to elevate how they perform — not just what they do. His sessions are known for being high-energy, experience-driven, and immediately relevant, combining insight, interaction, and structured reflection to create shifts that participants can feel in real time.

Whether addressing performance under pressure, confidence, decision-making, focus, resilience, or internal alignment, his work emphasizes practical inner leverage rather than motivation. Participants do not leave with inspiration alone; they leave with clearer awareness, stronger internal control, and actionable ways to apply what they’ve experienced in their daily lives and professional roles.

Drawing on his rare combination of senior business leadership, years of teaching, and deep inner-game training, Noaman works across formats — from keynote stages and executive classrooms to focused workshops and selective one-to-one engagements. His ability to move fluidly between corporate language and human experience allows him to connect with diverse audiences while maintaining depth, credibility, and seriousness.

This integrative approach is what led him to position himself as an Inner Game Architect — someone who does not simply teach tools or techniques, but works with the underlying systems that shape confidence, clarity, emotional strength, and sustained performance. His work is designed to help individuals and teams reduce internal friction, expand their performance range, and operate closer to their true potential — consistently, consciously, and with greater ease.