Dr. Karen De Asis receives twin recognitions for marketing leadership

Dr. Karen De Asis received the World Marketing Congress Awards' 2026 Most Admired Marketing Leaders, Philippines, and The Philippines’ Woman Leaders awards at ceremonies held at the Dusit Thani Manila on June 26.

The twin recognitions were given separately by the Women Leadership Congress Awards.

The Most Admired Marketing Leaders have been vetted by an advisory board from the CMO Asia, World Federation of Marketing Professionals, and World CSR on evaluation parameters that include effective brand management with a high trust quotient, experience in offline and online communication channels, customer centricity, agile thought leadership, and CSR branding that build long-term reputation, role modeling an increasing return mindset and education involvement among others.

On the other hand, the Philippines Woman Leaders award, a recognition given by the World Women Leadership Awards, celebrates women with resilience, innovation, and transformative leadership.

Recognitions are not new to Dr. Karen De Asis, who was recently recognized as a 2025 ASEAN Women Entrepreneurs Awardee representing the Philippines in an event held in Cambodia. Three other major recognitions mark the marketing and branding, entrepreneurial, and leadership career journey of Dr. De Asis, who is also the founder of MKS Marketing Consulting. These are the 2003 Agora Awardee for Excellence in Marketing Education, 2008 Outstanding Faculty Awardee, De La Salle University, and the 2018 Philippines Women Leadership Excellence recognition presented by the World Women Leadership Congress.

Dr. De Asis credits her marketing and leadership recognitions to family companies and brands that have placed their full trust in MKS Marketing Consulting’s expertise with the clear metric to make their brands dominant in the category.

Dr. De Asis believes that Filipino family businesses and their brands, whose primary goal is to become successful, also sustainably help Filipinos families rise out of poverty while pursuing their company goals. Dominating a category means enabling hundreds, even thousands, of employment opportunities. Sustainable and improved livelihoods raise the living standards of many families.

As a brand marketing and media company, MKS Marketing Consulting’s primary role is to enable Filipino companies and their brands to compete successfully in the marketplace.

“For more than a decade now, we have restricted our services to Filipino family businesses because we believe that Filipino-owned family companies with visionary owners are far more flexible and quicker to succeed. Once successful, they create a greater positive economic impact countrywide, triggered by their successful brands. MKS brand consulting business vision and mission is to help ensure the success of visionary-led and owned Filipino businesses so that many more Filipino families stand to gain not merely as consumers but as recipients of economic livelihood,“ states Dr. Karen.

“Technology, artificial intelligence, and the emergence of multi-generational consumer thinking have created both an exciting, interesting, and likewise complex world and marketing landscape. These challenges, however, can be addressed by a strategic and seasoned brand consultant’s insightful critical thinking and humanity-based creativity, multi-experience, innate consumer empathy, etc attributes devoid in Large Language Model (LLM) apps like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, among others. Today and the future forward are indeed exciting times,“ cites Dr. Karen.

MKS Marketing Consulting believes that strategic branding and marketing when done properly is the catalyst to business success. This means the combination of a smart brand strategy, compelling content, effective communication, and media implementation to drive compelling positive results.

“Leadership and great responsibility is inherent in a successful brand strategist’s work. Innate and creative intelligence is extremely necessary to navigate a successful brand. To build and manage successful brands by Filipino-owned companies not only creates market leaders and strong challengers and highly loyal consumers but the social impact and advocacy is far greater when more and more successful Filipino family businesses begin to expand and create sustained livelihood for many Filipino families through decades and generations to come. Such is the social impact and advocacy that our MKS brand consulting would like to establish,” further states Dr. Karen.

MKS Marketing Consulting has extensive experience in brand management and marketing across all retail, food, healthcare manufacturing, consumer durables, telecommunications, travel and trade, retail, fashion, personal care, and property development industries.

Dr. Karen De Asis earned her Doctor of Education major in education leadership and corporate social responsibility with high distinction from De La Salle University, College of Education, Taft Avenue, Manila. She completed her Master's in Business Administration, also with distinction, at the Ateneo Graduate School of Business. Following her doctoral degree are post-doctoral executive education fellowships in strategic marketing and leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Silicon Valley, USA in 2014; Strategic Leadership Executive Education Program of the Said Graduate School of Business in Oxford University in London, United Kingdom in May 2015; and Strategic Marketing Executive Education program of the Said Graduate School of Business, Oxford University the following year.