Minimum Requirements

• A degree or post graduate degree in Marketing and or in related Business Management.
• A minimum of 8 years’ experience in a channel, category or brand marketing function.
• Ability to travel outside of South Africa Borders: 30% travel.
• Lead, coach, develop a team of talented individuals across brand, category, data and research.
• Customer and distributor understanding and ability to work collaboratively with operational teams.
• Experience in analysing various sources of data across channels eg. IRI & Price Probe.
• Ability to manage stakeholders across brand, customer & suppliers.
• Project management skills to deliver on new product development.
• Ability to work with quantitative and qualitative research.
• Organizational skills, experience in meeting tight deadlines .
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills.
• Attention to detail & a results-driven attitude.
• Strong financial Acumen.

Important areas to specialise in:

• Category Development – Primary part of the role is to use data (sales & other) and turn it into actionable insight which forms the foundation of impactful marketing mixes focusing on price, promotion, assortment, and innovation.
• Shopper and Consumer Marketing – Build marketing shopper/consumer campaigns that can efficiently be delivered by the sales teams (internal & distribution) that recruit consumers to our brands and categories in existing categories and countries.
• Country Channel Planning – You will be responsible for the development of the Customer & Channel Marketing Strategies in line with the category and brand opportunities. Collaboration between the customer, distributor and internal stakeholders is critical to success.

Duties & Responsibilities

Market Data, Insight generation & Tracking

• Measure and review total category (and adjacent) performance and profitability.
• Analyse and track in-market measures at the customer and channel level, such as distribution, share, price, and merchandising performance.
• Utilize above data to manage shelf health, price promotional mix, merchandising strategies and implement effective cat man
• Lead a data and research team member to build trackers and reporting dashboards.
• Brief in and analyse research (quant and qual) to build insight-based opportunities across categories.

Strategy Formulation

• Build the category, country and brand strategies to deliver sustainable, profitable growth across key customers across the continent.
• Engage with the country and distributor teams to build the above strategies, then operationalize and implement those strategies through effective marketing tools that maximize the mix.
• Evaluate and monitor competitors and their activities and formulate proactive responses.
• Perform rigorous investment analysis and advise on allocating budget accordingly.

Operationalise the Strategy

• Partner with agencies in the respective categories to build 360-degree brand and shopper marketing campaigns in markets.
• Develop customer specific shopper marketing activities, including promotions, POS, site training/briefing information, merchandising solutions and products that generate real sales growth.
• Ensure smooth operational implementation and tracking of brand and shopper marketing activities.
• Review of brand and shopper marketing campaigns to ensure in-market effectiveness linked to campaign KPIs.

Distribution and Customer Engagement

• Prepare, analyze and present category strategies and reviews to customers and distributors
• Interact with customers and distributors on brand opportunities, collaborations or instore opportunities including but not limited to assortment analysis, category performance and ranging.
• Work with distributor partners through cycle meetings and top to top business reviews to build on new opportunities or new product launches.

New Product Development

• Project manage country specific innovation
• Work closely with cross-functional teams on customized NPD projects
• Ensure all allocated launches have strong motivating marketing mix and launch material.
• Ensure executional excellence and implementation through our distribution partners.

Financial Management

• Ability to work with financial and commercial stakeholders to build effective tacking and monitoring tools for team delivery
• Manage allocated parts of the Customer & Channel Marketing expenditure budget.
• Manage and track ROIC on spend.

KPI’s

• Achievement of annual business targets across volume, turn over and profitability.
• Brand market share and brand equity.