Datin Yasmin Ahmad Merican, advisor to AFS Antarabudaya Malaysia, was recently appointed as a trustee on the program’s global board. She joins 13 others from around the world to lead the governance of AFS International operating across more than 65 countries around the world.
Yasmin is a returnee to USA and was a former National Director at AFS Malaysia where her focus had been on the collaborative development of orientation and counselling support literature for the countries in Asia. She has had a successful business consulting career from communications through to programme management, business process and brand development. Following the successful branding of Techron Unleaded at Chevron, launching the industry’s first fuel brand in Malaysia, Yasmin joined Ernst & Young as a Director and later became the first female partner of EY Malaysia and also the first of two local partners seconded to the firms’ global consulting capability in the Asia Pacific region in the mid-1990s.
In 2000, she left EY to start her own brand consulting company, Trax Associates, to test new brand solutions for emerging market companies and institutions. This journey over the next 15 years included brand projects at a number of Malaysian institutions. Among others, this involved the formation of a new brand unit at national oil corporation Petronas to the launching of the Kuala Lumpur City Airport, the branding of MRCB, the building of marketing capabilities for the Formula 1 Race for Malaysia Airports, brand alignment at media companies NST and TV3, the repositioning of Bank Pertanian to Agrobank, product and brand development at SME Bank and also led the reimaging of PLUS, the largest expressway company in Malaysia.
Yasmin is also the author of “The Right to Brand”, the black book on branding. It is the first book written on brand building experiences from an emerging market in Asia. She served on the board of the Malaysian Productivity Corporation, was an industry advisor with the Monash School of Information Technology in Malaysia between 2008 and 2012 and recently the President of the Malaysian AEON Foundation between 2019 and 2021. She currently is a director on the board of AEON Credit Service (M) Berhad and fintech HelloGold.
