After a few years as an assistant, a free-lance journalist and a marketing manager with Donnay International, Manpower gave me a mission as an Executive Secretary, Corporate Marketing & Public Affairs, at 3M Europe in Brussels. I was hired very quickly and was soon asked to assist the coordination of pan European marketing material.



3M is one of the 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company produces hundreds brands with thousands of products, based on very innovative technology, across no less than 8 different business sectors, from healthcare to office supplies, in about 200 countries around the world.

It is then understandable that such a wide extension across businesses and across markets needs a very integrated marketing, to maintain unique corporate identity. My first tasks were to follow the production of product leaflets for the Medical Imaging and the Occupational Health & Environment Safety businesses, for Europe (by then about 10 countries). It was back in 1992, before the USSR broke down. However, there was obviously a need in the emerging markets in and outside Europe. 3M Europe then integrated East-Europe and Middle-East countries, and I was asked to coordinate corporate marketing material aimed at these new markets in addition to the 10 former European markets.

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I was in contact with all of these countries (about 26 in total, including countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Croatia, Slovakia, Belarus, ...) in a dozen of different languages (including Greek, Arabic, Russian languages, i.e. using different alphabets). Nowadays, we can easily imagine how to deal with such diversity. 20 years from now, it was quite unusual. With my colleagues across Europe and the Middle-East, we shared views and got to work quite well together.