Alberto Cajiga learned brands from the shelf outward. The early classroom was Procter & Gamble, where a product has a name, a margin, a promise, a forecast and very little patience for fuzzy thinking. His job was brand management across Mexico and Latin America. It was a place to discover that the visible part of marketing - the package, the campaign, the line people remember - rests on a hidden machine. Someone must understand the customer, make the choices, move the product and persuade a large organization to pull in one direction.
There was another education running alongside it. Cajiga had trained as an industrial engineer at Universidad La Salle Mexico. Engineering asks where the system bends, where work waits and what one decision does to the next. Brand management asks what people choose and why. Put those two habits together and marketing stops being a decorative layer. It becomes a way of organizing the business around a promise the operation can actually keep.
That combination would become the grammar of his career. More than 25 years took him from P&G to SCA and then Essity, across consumer categories, countries and business models. The scope expanded. The question stayed remarkably stable: how do you connect what a customer needs with what a complicated company can deliver?
The useful detour
In 2007, Cajiga moved from P&G to SCA, the Swedish group whose hygiene business would later become Essity. The move opened a run of roles that reads like deliberate cross-training. First came tissue. Then feminine care in Mexico and Central America. Then the full regional marketing brief. By late 2013, he was leading market and business development across Latin America.
Each assignment changed the object in view. A category leader learns the peculiarities of one market. A regional marketer learns that a clever plan can lose its meaning as it crosses a border. A business-development executive learns that a brand story is only as strong as its route to growth. The work moved from managing things to managing the connections between things.
Scope, widened one role at a time
P&G brand management across Mexico and Latin America
SCA category leadership in tissue, followed by feminine care
Vice President of Marketing for Mexico and Central America
Latin American market and business development
Global Professional Hygiene marketing at Essity
Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program
By 2018, Cajiga had moved to Philadelphia and into global marketing for Essity's Professional Hygiene business. Today his public title is Senior Vice President of Global Business Strategy and Marketing. The title matters less than the intersection it describes. He works where strategy meets the practical demands of a business operating in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with Tork sold across 100 markets.
“I believe that shaping the future of business requires us to first reshape ourselves as leaders.”Alberto Cajiga, 2026
Four words with jobs to do
Corporate strategy has a bad habit of turning verbs into wallpaper. Growth. Innovation. Transformation. Cajiga's public language becomes more interesting when he gets specific. After Essity's chief executive visited the Philadelphia office in 2025, he described four levers for Professional Hygiene: customer centricity, innovation, cost focus and operational agility.
These are often filed in separate departments. Cajiga presented them as one operating system. Customer attention tells a company which problem deserves solving. Innovation turns the observation into a useful product. Cost focus protects the economics. Agility shortens the distance between learning something and acting on it. A weakness in one corner travels through the rest.
The systems view also explains why Cajiga can move between consumer goods and a business-to-business brand without pretending they are identical. The buying context changes. The need to understand the customer does not. A household shopper makes a choice in seconds. A facility operator weighs usage, reliability, labor and supply. In both cases, the brand is the accumulated evidence that the company understands the job.
The award trail supplies another view of the work. His public profile lists an Effie Mexico Gold Award in 2010, Silver in 2014 and a Gran Global Effie in 2018. It also records a 2021 Best Launch Award tied to TENA Sustainability and Tork PaperCircle, followed by a 2023 Cannes Lions recognition for creative agency work. Awards are snapshots, but this sequence follows the widening job: local effectiveness, global effectiveness, launch craft and creative partnership.
His work in Argentina makes the point at ground level. In early 2025, Essity said it would begin producing Tork paper products locally through new machinery at a distributor's facility in San Juan. Cajiga framed the decision inside a regional ambition: “Crecer en Latinoamérica es uno de nuestros grandes objetivos estratégicos.” Growth, in this telling, meant more than selling the same thing harder. It meant changing the productive footprint to serve a market differently.
The humanist in the org chart
There is a second line on Cajiga's résumé that complicates the engineer-marketer pairing. From 2009 to 2012, while taking on broader responsibilities at SCA, he completed a master's degree in Human Development and Humanist Psychology at Universidad Iberoamericana. The subject is not a conventional box to tick on a global marketing résumé. It does, however, clarify the way colleagues describe him.
Public recommendations repeatedly return to the same qualities: he can simplify a complex challenge, bring cross-functional teams together, listen, coach and make people feel connected to the larger purpose. One former colleague described the blend as big-picture strategic thinking with a grounded, human style. Another emphasized his ability to move between strategy and execution across B2B and B2C environments.
These observations are useful because they show the mechanism beneath “people leadership.” Clarity gives a team a shared object. Listening improves the information available to the leader. Coaching spreads judgment beyond one desk. Trust reduces the drag of coordination. The human parts of management are part of how the business moves.
Clarity × trust × distributed judgment = a strategy that can travel.
Cajiga offered a small example after Essity acquired Legacy Converting in 2022. He visited the employees, introduced the company and Tork, and publicly welcomed them as a team. Acquisition language usually privileges assets, capabilities and synergies. The first lived experience is simpler: new colleagues want to know who has arrived, what will change and whether their work is seen. Showing up does not complete an integration, but it establishes the conditions in which integration can begin.
Still a student
In February 2026, Cajiga arrived in Boston for Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program. He had already spent more than a quarter-century at P&G and Essity. He described the program as a commitment to personal and professional transformation, not a finishing school for an established executive.
The distinction is revealing. Seniority can tempt a person to convert experience into certainty. Cajiga framed experience as a platform for another round of change. “Shaping the future of business,” he wrote, requires leaders to reshape themselves first. The statement fits the career that preceded it. Categories changed. Regions expanded. The work crossed from consumer marketing into a global business brief. Learning was not placed before leadership. It was embedded inside it.
Three weeks into the program, another observation stayed with him: women represented only 25 percent of the cohort. He responded by looking backward at the women who had shaped his own leadership at P&G and Essity. “I didn't learn leadership from a framework,” he wrote. “I learned it from watching women lead in practice, under pressure, on the hard days.”
The comment is personal without claiming ownership of anyone else's experience. It recognizes that a career is built through observation as well as promotion. People notice who remains clear when authority is questioned, who creates room, who holds a standard and who helps another person grow into it. Those lessons become part of the leader long after the meeting ends.
“I didn't learn leadership from a framework. I learned it from watching women lead in practice, under pressure, on the hard days.”Alberto Cajiga, 2026
The promise and the machine
Cajiga calls himself a brand builder and transformational CMO. Both phrases are easy to flatten into biography boilerplate. His record gives them sharper edges. A brand builder connects promise to proof. A transformational executive changes the routines that create that proof. The work lives in product choices, customer conversations, investment decisions, local production, team design and the willingness to revise one's own assumptions.
His route also offers a career lesson worth borrowing. The lateral moves were not detours from leadership. They were preparation for it. Tissue taught one set of category economics. Feminine care taught another customer context. Mexico and Central America added regional responsibility. Latin American business development widened the commercial field. Global Professional Hygiene demanded that all those forms of judgment coexist.
From Philadelphia, the brief now spans a business reported at $2.6 billion in sales, with a brand present across 100 markets. Scale can make leadership feel abstract. Cajiga's language keeps returning to tangible units: a customer, an innovation, a cost, a team, a leader willing to learn again. Global strategy becomes credible when those units connect.
The engineer in him can see the system. The marketer can see the choice. The student of human development can see the people whose judgment makes the system work. After 25 years, that combination may be the most accurate definition of transformation he has offered: not one grand reveal, but an organization learning to keep its promise, market by market and person by person.