Category Customer Shopper Marketing Manager - Lagos

Are you a commercial category leader with a passion for nurturing customer relationships to unlock category growth?

Are you an inspiring leader of people who will galvanise a team behind unlocking category growth for your customers and making a positive impact across the organisation?

Do you want to develop your career with a global and dynamic FMCG company?

This is a pivotal role that will ensure Arla’s growth plans and initiatives are converted into brilliant execution that drives growth, positively impacts shopper behaviours and continues to build our Dairy credentials within the industry. Your task is to support customers in finding the growth they need aligned with Arla’s strategic direction.

About the Role

This role is based within the region in West Africa.

As the Category Customer Shopper Marketing (CCSM) Manager, you will be the “voice of the customer/shopper” and the local commercial teams in West Africa. You will collaborate closely with the Regional, Local Marketing teams & other relevant stakeholders to secure excellent commercial executions. Your insights into consumer behaviour, market trends, and category dynamics will be instrumental in delivering impactful results.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop consumer centric growth strategies. Combine market, shopper and consumer insights to identify growth opportunities and execute these in close cooperation with in-market teams.
• Develop channel strategies (Foodservice, Traditional, Modern trade & other alternate channels). Lead development and implementation in accordance with local market needs
• Drive the objective of being the “Centre of Excellence” for the region by delivering on “insights to action” and creating world class enablers / comprehensive shopper marketing toolkits covering the full “path to purchase” for our shoppers across different channels. Toolkits are meant to be “Plug N Play” for local markets speedy production and flawless execution.
• Actively drive and deliver annual business plans together with local markets, to deliver strong growth agenda. Develop annual category calendar plans and ensure monthly updates and alignment between regional / local teams to deliver the best ROI for our campaigns.
• Support local markets in their JBP meetings with top customers by creating compact category growth story that highlights our dairy expertise/captainship and creates a win-win proposition with top retailer partners.
• Lead perfect store program from regional perspective by creating regional templates/tools for localisation and adaptations to fix Trade fundamentals. All developed tools should capture shopper insights, address channels dynamics and de-liver on our brands growth priorities
• Build Customer and shopper marketing capabilities across the markets
• Develop commercial propositions for key NPDs/MROs and be the voice of CCSM early in the innovation process
• Drive initiatives to optimize trade and BTL marketing investments
• Create regional synergies by identifying and sharing across the region best practices from different markets to benefit from and replicate
• Perform other tasks as required within the Marketing function

Key Skills

• Curious by nature and applies this to shopper/category understanding
• Commercially Astute – Full appreciation of retailer commercial challenges and business commercial challenges and able to navigate through them
• Operational working knowledge of category & shopper vision & strategy, category insights into action, route to market and channel, customer planning, promotion management and passionate selling
• Shopper and Category Obsessed – Genuine passion for understanding the shopper and using this understanding to drive a competitive advantage
• Category management and execution expert
• Strong commercial acumen
• Strategic thinker, but passionate about getting into details
• Process thinker and experienced in optimizing existing processes and creating new ones
• Relationship Builder – can build a rapport quickly and maintain it and comfortable independently managing stakeholders at all levels
• Inspires confidence – trusted to get on with the job and thrives with challenges
• Fluency in English. French is an added advantage

Qualifications & Experience Required

• Minimum Bachelor’s Degree in any Discipline. MBA is an added advantage
• Minimum 10 years Brand building experience in FMCG. Experience in Dairy is an added advantage
• Fully conversant with Kantar/Nielsen/Euromonitor, etc
• Channel and retail understanding
• Experience working on Strategy & execution
• Experience working in multiple team, multicultural environment with cross-border collaboration

We have a purpose for Good

At Arla, we strive to unlock the highest potential in each other while working together to create a sustainable future of dairy. We call it Stronger People Stronger Planet and it is deeply anchored in our organisation and founded on our commitment to respecting human rights, increasing access to healthy dairy nutrition, inspiring good food habits, and improving the environment for future generations. In order to succeed we need to hire people with a sustainable mindset. Could this be you?

BEWARE! RECRUITMENT FRAUD
It has come to our attention that there are a number of fraudulent emails and fake recruitment campaigns on the internet from people purporting to work for Arla Foods. Learn more via this link.

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Ref.: 92956

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