Category Insights Manager at Mondelez International

Job Number: 1901736
Job: Insights - Category Insights

Job Description

• This position is part of the MEA Beverages category, managing the Category Insights for all key market clusters under Middle Easyt & Africa.
• The purpose of this position is to actively contribute to the development of consumer-centric and market-relevant business strategies, and support the ambitious growth agenda of the BU.
• This position will be based out of Lagos, and will report into Manager, Category Insights Biscuits, Beverages and Meals MEA.
• Middle East & Africa is one of the 13 BUs established under the new Mondelez operating business model. Within each BU; separate category teams manage their respective brands and category P&Ls. The key categories being: Chocolate, Biscuits, Meals, Beverages and Gum & Candy. The Category teams lead the development and implementation of strategies that will drive a sustainable growth agenda of the BU.
• The role of Category Insights is to drive growth and business results by embedding people centric strategies and actions into the organisation, said in other words, “to inspire growth by connecting with people”.
• This role is responsible to develop and leverage BU consumer and market in-depth understanding into business implications and recommendations, with shared accountability for growth and delivery of business results. This role works very closely with the stakeholders in local markets as well as regional teams based in other parts of the BU.

Primary Accountabilities / Responsibilities 

• Consumer & Market Landscape: Understand the consumer landscape through analysis of the consumer and market dynamics, the structure of the market (i.e. occasions & need states, product domains, retail dynamics etc.) and macroeconomic, culture and people and channel trends.
• Bring core/SVC consumer to life: Understand the Core Consumer and identify the SVC (strategic valuable consumer), bringing each to life in the most inspiring way.
• Compelling Recommendations: Communicate clear and compelling recommendations for concrete growth activities by combining consumer and category knowledge, as well as insights from multiple sources with consumer and business knowledge, and synthesize to provide clear understanding of present and future growth drivers.
• Guide Decision making: Build insights which guide business decision making regarding the following areas (might be involved in all of these areas or only some of them):
• Portfolio and architecture: Own and competitor brand portfolio mapping, brand architecture and stretch, brand/product/pack architecture, understanding consumer cohorts
• Innovation: Role of Innovation in brand/category growth, innovation platform development research, product and pack design guidance
• Organic Brand growth: Core growth opportunities, brand maintenance (product/ packaging, assortment), communication development, product/brand benchmarking. Might be involved in developing Consumer and Shopper Map with MPP tools.
• Integrated connections: The Consumer Journey, connections planning, winning with customers
• Manage research projects and supervise suppliers to guarantee best practise project execution while meeting the standards of quality, timelines and cost effectiveness:
• Define the appropriate research methodology and ensure alignment and agreement on project background, objectives, design and action standards by all parties involved (Marketing,  R&D, Sales, etc.);
• Select the best supplier (create the brief and review research proposals) offering the required quality at a reasonable cost;
• Ensure research projects run smoothly (study design, test protocols, questionnaires and guidelines, stimulus material, presentation);
• Drive Action: Communicate all learning and insight in a compelling way to drive action: Ensure presentations and reports are clear and inspiring. Issue timely synthesis report with actionable recommendation for every piece of research. Base recommendation on findings generated in the respective research combined with insights from multiple sources and consumer and business knowledge. Work with agencies to ensure that reports and presentations are concise, easy to read as well as action orientated. Distribute reports and presentations including a short & crisp CI summary and clear recommendations
• Category / Market Analysis: Ensure high quality tracking of the category, brand performance and NPDs in the markets. (Analysis of Retail Panel data, Consumer Panel data, Advertising Tracking, Competitive Product Testing, etc.)
• Develop Agency Partner Relationships: Proactively build and maintain effective agency relationships, both research agency and creative agencies. Ensure quality deliverables and high ROI from research partners.
• Growth opportunities: Proactively highlight business growth opportunities for relevant markets, by conducting thorough analysis of consumer needs and market trends
• Business Information needs: To proactively identify business information needs and ensure timely delivery of data/analysis to address these needs
• Market monitoring: To empower stakeholders with regular updates of market trends and performance of Mondelez brands
• Multiple stake-holders: Interacting and Engaing with multiple stakeholders, most of who will be based in other locations.

Knowledge, Skills, Experience and Language Requirements
Knowledge: including education, qualifications and training:

• Higher education business / marketing degree
• Additional professional marketing qualification
• Strong understanding of Nielsen Retail Audit
• Strong analytical skills / comfortable managing large aadhoc data sets
• Preferably experience with Consumer research and Qualitative research
• Competent in all standard PC packages including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tablue (other visualization tools)

Leadership Competencies:

• Strong interest in ‘learning’ and training
• Strong leadership skills to challenge the status quo
• High analytical skills and wisdom/judgement to evaluate and improve delivery
• Ability to navigate the International structure and flexibility to work with differing work processes in each region
• Good interpersonal, intercultural and communication/influence skills
• Self starter, comfortable working within a remote team with members in multiple locations
• Effective management skills to develop team and lead/contribute to project management of custom projects.

Experience:

• Strong marketing research skills of at least 6 to 8 years of experience in this domain
• Demonstrated ability to build strong partnerships with key suppiers
• Experience working cross cultrually