Asia-Pacific Power List 2022: Edmund Lee, Red Bull

Edmund Lee

Head of marketing and strategy
Red Bull Malaysia
Malaysia
New member 

Somewhere on the path from being a small start-up in 1987 to becoming the most popular energy drink on the planet and selling more than 9.8 billion cans globally in 2021, Red Bull charmed audiences and became a ubiquitous marketing force. They did this with quirky, smart marketing and creative thinking instead of aggressive mass-media commercials.

Putting the audience first and product second has paid off in a big way. For more than three decades, the company has dominated a space which didn’t exist before. Head of marketing and strategy for Red Bull Malaysia, Edmund Lee, plays a crucial part in the brand’s unique and clutter-breaking history in Malaysia.

Big on the data-driven culture, Lee is an outright promoter of analytics and believes that numbers should drive all aspects of business marketing—from the boardroom to the selling floor, and everything in between.

“Data has the tendency to unearth a lot of counterintuitive things [and] challenge what we think we know,” he was quoted in 2018 after Red Bull Malaysia failed to meet sales targets for two consecutive years and their market share shrank. Taking ownership of analytics and actioning on insights helped the beverage giant become synonymous with the upper echelons of sports, and it eventually climbed to the numero uno energy drink status in Malaysia, dominating 48% market share. 

Winner of several top CMO awards—including the 2021 Marketing Weekender Award, a 2021 and 2020 gold for the best marketer in Omni Channel, and 2019 Silver at the FMCG Trailblazer—Lee is the energiser behind the successful ‘Mara Kita Membara’ campaign which captivated the resilient quality of Malaysians.

A University of Oklahoma alum, Lee is an industry veteran with work spanning local, regional, and global sales and marketing, retail, business development, revenue growth, and client servicing in big-ticket companies like Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Tesco Dunnhumby.