School of Business Administration

In a recent interview with the School of Business Administration’s newest Business Advisory Council member, Anita Watkins ('93), Marketing Senior Maggie Bremyer discovered Watkins' deep passion for her work and involvement with the UD community.

Anita Watkins, a 1993 University of Dayton marketing graduate, began her career in insurance sales, where a pivotal research project sparked her passion for marketing research. After three decades in Atlanta and extensive global travel to over 50 countries, she now resides in Dayton, serving as Chief Solutions Lead for Innovation, Creative, and Qualitative North America and Global Qualitative Lead at Kantar, a leading marketing analytics firm.

Anita’s passion and commitment are evident in everything she pursues. Her deep involvement at UD began as a student in the Finance and Marketing clubs, which she credits for helping build her foundational skills. Now, as a dedicated Flyer alumna, Anita felt a strong pull to engage with her alma mater upon her return to Dayton. Through her role on the Business Advisory Council, she brings an immense depth of experience, ready to support and mentor current students. Her enthusiasm for sharing knowledge and inspiring future leaders reflects her lasting commitment to the UD community.

Interview Section: 

Maggie Bremyer: I know you said you had some family members who attended UD. So, how did you end up choosing UD? Was that the biggest factor that led you to the university?

Anita Watkins: My dad had suggested that I look at the University of Dayton, his alma mater. I remember immediately being right in front of Kennedy Union and just walking around the main part of campus, feeling immediately calm and having a sense of being at home. I felt welcome there. And I think then that the school offered me some scholarship money, and at that point, I decided I didn't even want to look at any other schools. I wanted to just go to UD. It was natural, but I went with my gut instinct, honestly, because the school was good and had all the credentials that I was looking for.

Maggie Bremyer: How did your experiences at UD inside and outside of the classroom prepare you for your current role?

Anita Watkins: The first thing that comes to mind is getting a solid grounding in business. Being a business major and a marketing major, having all of the fundamentals covered with that, including some of those things that you need to understand, with topics from economics and statistics to marketing and advertising, all of which I use on a daily basis now. I started to get involved on campus, and that made all the difference and developed the mindset of doing something extra and not knowing what the experience is really going to be about, but just go try it. I've carried that mindset into my career, where I've had a lot of different extra things available to me. That's what I think one of the things that I carried forward into my work life is to try to get involved, plugin, do something extra, whether it's industry associations now or this Business Advisory Council, things like that where you really put yourself out there and don't just do your day job but do a little bit extra.

Maggie Bremyer:  What skills did you find most valuable from these opportunities at UD by joining these clubs? What qualities and skills did you grow in?

Anita Watkins: The first one was relationship building, networking, and making connections. I remember some of the friends I had in some of the clubs, such as the finance club. For instance, I can remember the people that I kept in touch with. I remember they weren't necessarily in every class, or maybe they weren't in my social circles at school, but just those relationships and those connections, I think that was a skill that I probably started to develop at that point that I think has been a critical skill throughout my career. I always say that I've grown my career through relationships, whether it's internal colleagues or, external clients or other industry professionals, and keeping those relationships authentic and alive, and connected. Also, expanding your horizons. So your mindset, you may see things this one way, and when you join a club or something extra or you expose yourself to new ways of thinking, your world just grows, and so does what becomes available to you as a result. I feel like an open mind is a healthy mind, and when you're always open to learning and expanding your ways of seeing things or adding new information to what you already know, obviously that's really important throughout your career and throughout life in general.

Maggie Bremyer:  Let's take it back to when you were a senior at UD and you were in my shoes; what do you wish you had known when you were in my position? Or what advice would you give to seniors like me looking to join the workforce after college?

Anita Watkins: I would say try to meet as many professionals as possible in business and learn about what their job is, how they got into their roles, where they started, what twists and turns did their career take, and what are the things that they did to get into their position. I would try to get exposed to all the different types of roles out there. I started out in sales and I learned so many good skills in sales. You have to use sales no matter what role you're in in business because you're always selling, whether it's to your team, your executive team, or your private equity owners who need to invest in you; you're always selling. At the time I didn’t really know about marketing research, data insights, or anything that I am in now, that I have spent 28 years in now. There are just absolutely so many roles out there. Look at the range available to the marketing grad, let alone all these other territories.

Maggie Bremyer: I know that you said you started in sales and you found your route with marketing research. What influenced your decision to choose that particular route in marketing?

Anita Watkins: Coming out of school, I had to get a job. I had moved to Atlanta, I started off in insurance sales, and I got put into this management training program where if you hit certain milestones, they would promote you, and you were on a fast track. That was hard work, but it was going well. Sometime during the second or third year, the company that I worked for had been acquired by a large Dutch firm called ING. They had brought in all these consultants to do some reinventing of the marketing function, and they wanted to do some focus groups with the field of Salesforce to find out what the corporate marketing function needed to supply to the field sales teams to make them more effective. They tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I would like to go and do research and report back to the corporate office to present to the consultants. I had no idea what I was really doing. I had to go into my attic in my condo and pull out my marketing research textbook from UD. I really enjoyed the research, stating what I learned and giving recommendations based on it. I drove back to my condo, and I told myself, ‘I wonder if there's a job doing this?’ This is so fun. I love understanding people, what their needs are, and then making business recommendations from it. I went back to my textbook and started researching, and found the field of qualitative research. It just so happened that there was a company hiring in Atlanta at that time. I did an interview and was told that they were looking for someone with more industry experience. I went to my husband, who was my fiance at the time, and I said ‘I am going to get that job.’ I was in the sales mindset, and the following week, I faxed the hiring lady a note with the three reasons she should let me take her to lunch and tell her why I knew I could do the job. I took her to lunch, we hit it off, and then in the afternoon she asked me to call off work to come back and interview. I interviewed the whole day, and to make a long story short, I beat out three other senior people, but the reason I didn't give up was I said to her “I can be trained, I know I want to do this, here's why I think I can be good at this, here's what excites me about this”. The best part of the whole story was to walk in with my offer letter to my fiance at the time, to tell him that I got the job.

Maggie Bremyer:  Within your role, what are some of your day-to-day challenges that you face? What are some of the long-term challenges that you're looking at right now?

Anita Watkins: I think that the biggest challenge right now is that a lot of our clients need to get their data insights just much faster, and they need to get them socialized in the organizations much broader, much deeper, and really anchored in. One of our biggest challenges from a Kantar side, when we're supplying data, insights, and research, we want to make sure that our data is secure, and we're employing security measures, privacy, et cetera, and doing all of this in an agile, faster way. That's one of our biggest challenges. The second challenge is investing a lot of money to develop AI-enabled products and services and ways of working that can help us drive efficiency into what we do and, hopefully, better thinking. The third challenge is keeping people motivated. I think right now it's interesting. In the US, we have offices in a lot of the major cities like New York, Chicago and LA, and other places, but we don't have an office here. I am remote. One of the challenges I have is that now, in this new role, I have to get up and fly quite a bit when I go and meet the local teams, which is not necessarily too difficult, but you do have to have a budget for that, and you do have to have the energy to go and do it. That's always tricky because we had one way of living and working and everything pre-pandemic, and then the pandemic shook everything up.

Maggie Bremyer:  How do you stay motivated in your role?

Anita Watkins: I am blessed with a lot of internal motivation. I have a lot of natural energy. I've always been that way, and I like a challenge. I am always thinking, ‘okay, what else could I do?’ The other thing that motivates me is the fact that I really like what we do. I mean, that's one thing I would say to any student graduating or when you're starting out in your career, try to find that part of your working life, the working world, where you have an innate interest in what you're doing. I love diversity and global travel. I enjoy international travel and immersing myself in these different ways of living. For me, another thing that keeps me motivated is it's just naturally interesting to me the work that we do. I think that's the thing I would say with anybody, is just find what you really enjoy, and if you have a natural passion for the thing you do, you'll only ever be successful because you'll put your heart and soul into it because it just comes to you.

Maggie Bremyer:  I know that you had said that when you came back to Dayton, the first thing you thought of was joining something at UD. What motivated you to become a business advisory council member, and what perspective do you plan to bring to the council?

Anita Watkins: Well, the first thing is that I'm interested in the next generation and students. And I have been doing a lot of guest lecturing on campuses now for a number of years.  When I first moved back to Dayon, I started mentoring students in the alumni mentoring program.. I am interested in how to help students and how to help their careers. And I think as part of the council is looking at what is being offered at the school. I want to look at everything that's available for students and make sure it's maintaining its status and continuing to always be the highest quality degree that can be out there. The second thing I hope to bring to this is fresh perspectives from recent experiences. I can bring a perspective from a consultant side, but also from a brand side, having worked so closely with them; that's exciting. I've also been part of a lot of initiatives in Kantar where we have our private equity owners, and they're investing in us, and they're using technology and infusing money to create new ways of working, and AI is the big thing now. I have a lot of experience from that and knowledge that I can hopefully share about where that's all going in the future. Then, the culture piece, if there's anything I can do on that side of it, that's been the biggest thing for me that I think is having a thriving culture, a team culture that we create in Kantar and the teams that I lead and the businesses that I look after having really high performing groups that really like to work together and want to win together and that they enjoy the work they do. I think just those experiences and those for the last 30 years, all of that hands-on experience in the business world, from working with brands to venture capital and everything in between. I hope I can bring that to the party. Also, the global nature of the roles I've been in is another thing that I can bring. It's just all those experiences, having traveled to 54 countries now.  I'm hoping to learn too, from the other council members, the leaders in the school, the faculty, obviously Dean Collier, and others. I'm excited to learn what's on their agenda, what their plans are, what their ambitions are, and how I can contribute to that. I'm excited to just jump in and see where I can be involved.