Andrea Saldívar Espinoza

Cars, marketing, and magic. These are Andrea’s passions.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in International Marketing and Logistics from La Sabana University in Bogotá, Colombia, and serving as a public relations intern at Audi Colombia, Andrea landed a job with Porsche-Holding group.

She took the opportunity and ran with it. Andrea took on roles in public relations, retail, marketing communications, and customer relationship management. During her tenure, she coordinated public relations for Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, Skoda, and Man. And handled the company’s crisis management response to the Volkswagen ”Diesel Gate” case in Colombia. Talk about trial by fire.

Three years later, another challenge presented itself. This time, it was British luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. The company was about to launch operations in Colombia, and they needed a savvy marketing professional on their new team. The selection process was rigorous, Andrea recalls. “They wanted an autonomous candidate with a high level of industry knowledge, who was also trilingual in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.” Despite being the youngest candidate, at 23, Andrea wasn’t daunted. She won the position.

For the next year, with a remote support team based in Brazil, Andrea built Jaguar Land Rover’s marketing operation in Colombia. “It was a really interesting and challenging opportunity for me,” she says, “because at a young age I was in charge of a 360- degree marketing department. And obviously, to establish a whole company presence from zero, it was quite an experience.”

Andrea tackled the job with fierce determination. She executed the company’s first brand health study in the country, and with an emphasis on digital and e-commerce, created a robust marketing strategy that covered retail, communications, public relations, and customer relations management. Her expertise and dynamic vision helped create a sustainable growth strategy for the company, and a successful re-launch of both luxury brands. With Andrea in the lead, in the first year of direct operation, sales grew one-hundred and twenty percent, and market share doubled. Needless to say, her bosses were pretty impressed.

Andrea loves her job. She did not want to leave Jaguar Land Rover to get her MBA, which is why she chose the Questrom Online MBA. She knew the program would give her a rigorous education with lots of flexibility. And with an inaugural class made up of thirty percent international students like her, Andrea fit right in. Raised in a Mexican family, Andrea is eager to share her knowledge of business in Latin America with her classmates and hopes to learn just as much from them in return.

So, what about the magic? That comes from Andrea’s husband. Literally.

Andrea’s husband, Juan Serna, is an amateur magician, and for the past year or so, the couple has given informal talks and presentations to businesses in Colombia. “We discovered that magic and wonder are great vehicles to transmit long-lasting messages,” Andrea says. Their vision for the future is to launch a marketing and sales consultancy together. “Our goal is to combine marketing knowledge with the communicative power of magic,” Andrea says, “to offer strategic management advice and business skills training for companies in Latin America.” In the meantime, Juan is working as a skincare marketing manager (Middle Americas) for Unilever, and pursuing his Online MBA at Questrom, too.

Andrea is excited to put what she’s learning in the Online MBA into practice in her current work, but she also hopes to learn how to launch her own business.

“I want to use the MBA as a source or an incubator to start creating our own enterprise,” she says, “to start creating all the strategic pillars of our company when we bring it to life in a few years.”