Job Description

Job Summary

Consumer Platform Lead: Africa, Middle East, and Eastern Europe: Permanent Position: Western Cape

The successful candidate will take responsibility to design, develop, and incubate new Consumer-led propositions that set the client up for sustained future growth in the face of shifting consumer needs and disrupting technology.

Key Performance Areas:

• Consumer innovation Strategy design and development:
• Collaborate with the Innovation Foresights and Insights lead, global and regional strategic insights teams and OpCos to design and develop a pipeline of relevant Consumer Growth Platform projects and propositions (global platforms and projects as well as for AMEE markets), leveraging a deep understanding of the consumer in this space, and a broad understanding of the market and category landscape in the target OPCOs.
• Integrate latest research, technological advances and strategic consumer insights into innovation proposition design and development.
• Build a shared understanding of the shifting Consumer landscape, dynamics, and opportunities within relevant teams and with stakeholders.
• Lead the development of a range of compelling concepts within each project to solve innovation challenges, of which 2-4 pass action standards on screening and enter the pipeline for further development.

• Innovation Pipeline Development:
• Ownership of the consumer platform innovation project pipeline, driving projects from idea generation to business case approval.
• Identify and contract internal and external experts who add valued contributions to innovation pipeline outputs, ensuring their effective and active participation.
• Ensure that relevant consumer-led design insights form the foundation for FIRST OR BEST mood innovation outputs.
• Work closely with in-country manufacturing teams, global R&D teams, and category product development experts to develop suitable product formulations.
• Ensure that final formulations are viable (meet brand guardrails, viable within local manufacturing infrastructure, commercially attractive).
• Lead integration of local legal product definitions, tax dispensations as well as other regulatory considerations into final brand and variant solutions. Collaborate and integrate expertise from legal and regulatory teams to build a common database that is used to drive and test innovation expansion thinking across Hubs and OpCos.
• Where relevant, collaborate with brand custodians in marketing to establish clear guardrails for liquid sensory and taste profiles, brand positioning, life-stage models, and communications mix.
• Ensure that brand integrity is maintained across brand adaptation initiatives.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams and other innovation hubs to build expanded category understanding and capability of HOW TO WIN beyond beer.

• Technical and Technological Integration:
• Lead Consumer growth platform teams to ensure that the latest technical, technological and market advancements are identified, assessed, and integrated into the innovation pipeline where relevant.
• Collaborate with regulatory and legal teams to ensure that pipeline projects comply to regulatory and legal requirements as well as within CLIENT policy.
• Make recommendations and implement shifts in project outcomes/ priorities based on insights from latest technical and technological opportunities, thus ensuring continuous improvement.
• Integrate neuroscience to create compelling, unique, and relevant offerings that deliver on their product promise to consumers.

• Consumer Validate, Optimize, and Incubate (where relevant) to optimize Innovation propositions and refine a playbook for successful scaling:
• Lead innovation incubation commercial resources to design and implement relevant in-market incubation of innovations, where relevant.
• Gather insights, test, validate and optimize and adapt propositions or go to market support.
• Use insights to validate the need to either stop, refine, or scale innovations.
• For scaling innovations collaborate with relevant stakeholders to obtain buy in to the scaling plan to ensure successful handover to in-market teams.

Collaborate and build partner networks to accelerate new capability build where relevant:

• Collaborate with in-market teams to build relevant expertise and insight that ensures new brands are launched with consumer relevance and impact.
• Capture key manufacturing and go to market learnings on innovation projects to drive continuous improvement and accelerate scaling ability for other markets.
• Collaborate with OpCo teams, regional and global teams, and other Innovation Hubs to build the beyond beer category and manufacturing process understanding.

Education:

• Relevant bachelor's degree with a post graduate qualification or diploma either in marketing, marketing communications or consumer research.

Experience:

• Proven experience (10+ years) in brand development, innovation, and commercial strategy.
• Prior experience within new to market Innovation development that is consumer oriented is preferred.
• Strong strategic thinking skills with the ability to synthesize complex information and identify opportunities.
• Knowledge of functional ingredient science, neuroscience, and their application in product development to drive differentiation.
• Strong communication and inter-personal skills to facilitate cross-functional teamwork and support for the mood innovation pipeline.
• Proven ability to turn strategy into action with a drive to deliver impactful results for the business and ability to build belief in the need to build new capabilities and consumer offerings to meet future market needs.

Functional Competencies should include:

• Category, Portfolio & Brand understanding
• Channel, Competitor and Shopper understanding & insights.
• Consumer at the Centre (FIRST OR BEST)
• Route To Market, Channel & Customer Understanding
• Value chain understanding
• Brand and innovation development
• Revenue & Profit Growth Management
• Structured innovation process
• Business case development
• Partnering and negotiation

Behavioral Expectations:

• Demonstrates behaviors aligned to role expectations:
• Play to Win and Celebrate Success (Strong drive & ambition, Strong humility, is pragmatic)
• Deliver the Goods (Creates and maintains momentum, Removes barriers to delivery)
• Thinks Consumers first (Consumer and customer centric, external focus, sets the direction)
• Makes Courageous Moves (Takes bold positions, challenges existing way of doing things)
• Champions a Culture of Belonging (Inspiring storyteller, Excellent stakeholder management)
• Learn, Share, Reapply (Champions knowledge sharing)
• Have Real Conversations (Drives people performance, Enables talent development)
• Embraces Learning and Growth (Builds new strategic capabilities, Demonstrates a growth mindset)

Please contact me for a skills matrix:

Isilumko Staffing

Recruiter

OR

Job Mail