Head - Consumer & Market Intelligence at Olam Nigeria Limited

Reporting To: Sr. Vice President & Head - Marketing (Packaged Foods Business)

Purpose of Job

• The key purpose of the job is directing the consumer insights and research function for PFB to deliver superior business results.
• Be accountable for the overall market research and bring expertise in consumer research, syndicated data, trend analysis and the application of key analytics tools to the full breadth of business activities
• Ensure that knowledge is integrated and synthesized to provide clear, actionable, and impactful insights and business recommendations.
• Establish a best-in-class insights organisation.
• The person should bring the voice of the Consumer/ Shopper to the key processes from Brand Architecture & Positioning development to Brand Strategy to Consumer Experience Activation to NPD Innovation.
• He/ she should serve as a key influence of driving action-oriented research into date-driven daily decision making across categories & brands within PFB.
• He/ she should uncover insights which will open-up opportunities for growth.

Key Accountabilities
Drive research leadership:

• Understand business issues/ opportunities and work out research plans including an annual research plan.
• Own the development and execution of breakthrough research strategies and proactively lead efforts to identify research needs.
• Actively leverage all existing information – custom research, analytics, syndicated and secondary – to develop a holistic market and consumer understanding that is actionable and impactful.
• Ensure that the appropriate tools, methodologies and techniques are used to meet business objectives and timelines.
• Assess the marketing information needs of the categories/ brand(s) and develop and implement applications to fill those needs.
• Present consumer insights and research to leadership to create awareness of, discuss implications of, and recommend appropriate action steps.
• Provides functional expertise & leads the planning and execution of research projects across the division.
• Lead development, operationalization and deployment of strategic category and consumer understanding plan (Need/ Occasion segmentation, U&A, Market Landscape, Regimen Studies, Volumetric Estimation etc.), to uncover key consumer, category and portfolio opportunities
• Assist in developing high scoring communication via leading the copy testing for the hero brands.
• Lead continuous monitoring and analysis of established brand (including equity tracking studies, tracking & evaluating communication) and new product activity, establishing action standards, as appropriate.
• Champion development and application of tools and techniques to drive the forecasting of the size of a new product launch.
• Monitor all research projects to ensure that quality, timing, and cost goals are met.

Uncover deep consumer insights:

• Successfully package, operationalize, and socialize insights across the business.
• Represent the voice of the consumer and ensure consumer insights are integrated into decision making and embedded in the organization.
• Generate consumer insights with the marketing teams and work with them to make the projects (products, communication) engaging for consumers.
• Uncover shopper insights.

Innovation Insights:

• Identify unmet and unarticulated consumer needs and white space opportunities. Facilitate discussions to focus innovation pipeline on strategic consumer opportunity areas.
• End-to-end integration of insights starting from ideascaping, concept research, packaging research, product research, CUTs, STMs/ retail labs, post-launch evaluations during the development & implementation process working with ‘marketing’ & ‘R&D’ functions.
• Tracking trends, providing integrated, synthesized trend information
• Track consumer trends (from traditional sources & predictive social listening) and emerging insights relative to our Packaged Foods Business.
• Lead development and deployment of next-generation Trends approach, including Global Category Trends, parallel industry trends, sub-category trends, and predictive social listening to identify signals of emerging trends
• Drive integration and operationalization of predictive analytics as a competitive advantage (Eg. Global Macro & Emerging Trends).
• Facilitate Trend to Action Program to react to trends predicted.

Strategic Watch:

• Organise an in-depth strategic watch (consumer [incl. demographic, consumption, socio economic, cultural trends], competition, new business models), identify the major trends in the market and among consumers and distill market opportunities. Formalise strategic recommendations based on this analysis to feed the growth strategy of the business
• Development of Expertise of Team & Partners
• Work with the internal clients (Marketing teams, Sales Capability, R&D, Business Heads etc.) to develop their understanding of the consumer, generation of insights and market research.
• Partner Development & Team Building - Providing partners with coaching, feedback, and developmental opportunities and building effective teams.
• Play a collaborative role with the brand teams in setting marketing objectives, strategies and business principles by providing guidance to business teams in identifying and articulating key business issues and opportunities for the assigned brands from consumer understanding.

Requirements
Experience:

• Experience of min 10 years in Market Research either on the agency side or client side.
• A blend of qualitative and quantitative research in a business-to-consumer environment (durables/ CPG) is desired.
• Leading Insight Teams in client organisations will be an added advantage.

Internal Interfaces:

• Marketing
• Sales
• R&D
• PFB Business Heads
• PFB Global Head

External Interfaces:

• Market Research Agencies
• Communication Agencies
• Consultants

Functional Competencies/ Experience

• Functional experience should include Market Research (Qualitative & Quantitative) and one or more of the following - Consumer & Shopper Insights, Client facing role as a market research supplier, Digital & Social Media Analytics, Market Research Manager (at a CPG company).
• Hands-on experience with primary and secondary research, syndicated research,in-store research, and unstructured data. Should be an expert in BHT, U&A, Segmentation Studies (including Need/ Occasion Opportunity Sizing), Digital Media Research, a working knowledge of basic statistics (variance, standard deviation, confidence intervals, significance testing, correlation,  regression, factor analysis, cluster analysis etc.).

Other Competencies:

• Passion to act as the consumer’s champion within the organization - putting the consumer and her experience at the centre of decision making.
• Leadership: Setting goals for the work group & develop organisation capability. Proven skills to autonomously direct or execute work.
• Lead and inspire action and change through strategic analytics and insights. Able to coordinate and leverage tools (syndicated & customised data from agencies, data analytics, social listening etc.) to shape actionable insights fuelling growth-driving responses across big, fast and new opportunities in across categories & brands.
• Builds Collaborative Relationships: Team Player. Builds relationships based on trust and respect. Promotes the inclusion of diverse knowledge, skills, and experiences to achieve results. Ability to collaborate with and across categories and functions.
• Drives Creativity and Innovation: Focuses on areas of highest potential. Creates newness or connects knowledge in new ways to create the unexpected. Ensures that the creativity and innovation pipeline are aligned to achieve strategy and goals.
• Drives multiple projects simultaneously.
• Has strong Communication & Presentation Skills
• Able to work in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment
• Ability to connect to different cultures
• Provides coaching, mentoring, and development of talent of the Insights and Analytics area.