Consumer Planner and Research at Westfield Consulting

Essential Duties and Responsibilities
Opportunity identification:

• 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 the 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 an 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 the 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 the 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 dependant on the research and appropriate stakeholder sign off.
• Capture and summarise 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).

Job Requirements

• Candidates should possess a Bachelor's Degree qualification.
• At least 8 years of work experience.

Key Behaviours:

• Ruthlessly prioritises 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, focussed 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 an 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.