Overview

To proactively provide a holistic, end-to-end view of the opportunities for growth in our market and to articulate from a culture, consumer, and shopper point of view how we go about addressing these opportunities. The position holder will lead the total business with ideas and insights that sell more. Responsible of the overall leadership for the various research needs to develop, commercialize, and evaluate to life Innovations projects. Actively shape the future pipeline, size the opportunities, and develop a clear and robust 5Ws for every Innovation project. Creating focus and ownership for shaping business’ future ambitions. Ensure Granular understanding of consumption and purchase behavior by occasion, channel and outlet type – Who is consuming, What, Where, When and Why as well as providing Motivation and other drivers of behavior by occasion & brand, e.g. equity, brand associations

Key responsibilities and accountabilities

• Proactively defines and communicates opportunities for growth for the market, categories and brands and articulates what it will take to realise these opportunities.
• Build a detailed strategic understanding of the market, category and brands– their size, change over time and forecasts.
• Ability to understand competitive landscape and how it impacts current and potential growth.
• Key channels and customers, size and change over time and influencing factors.
• Current and emerging trends (macro-economic, social, consumer/shopper, retail, technology, legislative etc.) and implications for innovation strategy and commercialisation.

• Synthesizes data and understanding from multiple sources – quantitative and qualitative and joins the dots in a meaningful, actionable way–
• Develop an annual learning plan to identify the learning needs on innovation project for the year so knowledge ‘gaps’ are clearly identified, and budget is spent on ‘the least amount of the most powerful research’ to answer the right questions at the right time.
• Keep up to speed on new learnings from internal or external research/publications that might be relevant to inform robust Innovations territories, ideas.

Insight Capabilities

• Seeks out deep consumer / shopper / category insight and implications that will drive penetration growth-
• Being able to select and apply the different types of qualitative and quantitative methods to generate the inputs to great insights, which to use, when, and for what purpose.
• Gather latest thinking from behavioural sciences – the factors explaining human decision making and behaviour.
• Knowledge on how to generate Insight and how to recognise what great looks like.

M&E: Experience

• Ensures learnings from measurement & evaluation are applied to increase productivity of our A&P spend-
• Work in partnership with key research agency partners to deliver the programme of research required for the year – inform, involve, and inspire them so they have a detailed understanding of the outcomes required, not just conduct projects in a vacuum.
• Write a research brief (or request for research document) for every research project commissioned with clearly articulated objectives, desired business outcomes, decisions dependent on the research and appropriate stakeholder sign off.
• Capture and summarize the learnings from each piece of M&E conducted as it happens to be able to distil and share findings and inform future decisions.
• Being able to recommend how to measure the post launch effectiveness (sales, share, penetration, consumer behaviour etc.) and efficiency (ROI)

Key Behaviours

• Ruthlessly prioritizes and focuses on tasks that add maximum value.
• To get the most from agencies, build a strong needs-based agency roster with world class capabilities to ensure we maximise our research investment.  Spend time on developing brilliant relationships with the selected agencies so you can set them up to deliver successful outcomes for the business. Write a clear brief for every project and work with your agencies to deliver clear, concise, focused and action oriented debriefs.

• Effectively influences the business to make the right consumer/ shopper led strategic and commercially savvy decisions-
• How to construct a compelling point of view supported by appropriate evidence distilled from multiple sources relevant to the business context to influence the audience in the most effective way. (For example, ensure information is pitched at the right level with the right level of detail and is grounded in an understanding of the commercial/ market /consumer situation and context to be credible and actionable.)

• Fuels the business with consumer / shopper led provocations and understanding to instigate change.
• Build consumer / shopper expertise through exposing self to as much internal and external information and understanding as possible. Beyond the research projects commissioned and internal data available, sign up to alerts, newsletters, forums, and blogs or attend external events and meetings to absorb and learn as much as possible.

• Externally attentive – to culture, trends, and marketplace dynamics, to detect the factors that could positively or negatively impact growth –
• Run sessions with core teams to expose and familiarise them with the relevant consumer, culture and market trends to shape and inform their thinking & to identify cultural territories, and throughout the year to inspire briefing and activation development.
• Live in culture by proactively keeping a watching brief and connection to what’s going on, what’s hot / what’s not, what is growing or declining in importance in order to develop an intuitive understanding of the world our consumers/shoppers live in and be able to leverage it in our day-to-day work.

Qualifications

• Appropriate tertiary marketing qualification – degree / diploma
• Suitable Post Graduate qualification is desirable.
• Experience in Consumer research would be an added advantage.

Experience

• Minimum 8 years’ experience across the Marketing portfolio, including deep Insights / Consumer Planning functional expertise.
• Commercial leadership experience is desirable.
• Track record of success in highly demanding organisations
• Track record of delivering measurable commercial results through insight generation and delivery of actionable plans.
• Experienced in directing and managing complex planning & research projects, including demonstrated understanding of what can and can’t be achieved via different techniques and approaches.
• Ability not just to interpret research data, but to be able to discover and apply consumer understanding & insights to drive brand growth.
• Demonstrated ability to effectively inspire, manage and coach a team of functional experts to achieve world class performance.
• Creative and flexible conceptual thinker, but capable of critical, objective evaluation – able to blend the art and the science.
• Exceptional facilitation skills – able to lead a team through a process to achieve a solution.
• Expert influencer; able to gain buy-in for recommendations.

Behavioral Competence

• Act with pace and be resilient in achieving great results.
• Extrovert
• Conscientious
• Innovative & Creative but also intellectually rigorous in the thinking
• Deeply curious about consumers, shoppers, brands
• Immersed in a culture and obsessive about harnessing it
• Bold, Influential leadership
• Emotional Intelligence – Empathy
• Truly collaborative, key team player but an objective voice of reason