Assistant Brand Manager

Are you a passionate Marketeer with a love for Food and Cooking? Are you looking for a challenging mission to win consumer’s hearts and positively impact their cooking journeys with tasty and purposeful products?  If the answer is yes, come join our Central Scratch Cooking team, to work together on one of the biggest in Unilever Brand Knorr in the Ready to Eat Wet Soups Platform. 

The Brand: Knorr is Unilever’s the biggest brand in the Unilever Portfolio, strong across both Retail and UFS. Present in 87 countries it has a strong footprint in both the Developed and D&E markets and has a long and successful history of close to 180 years. For a brand of our size and heritage, our challenge is to stay relevant and to unlock greater growth in a food category which is becoming increasingly disrupted by smaller players and where food tastes and aspirations are changing.  

Wet Soups is a core business of Knorr in a number of countries with a turnover size of about 200mln, it is a key segment for the brand and for the European business. With time we see markets & consumer behaviour fragmentating and eating habits shift, we are on a journey to massively transform this business developing a number of relevant and new propositions for new targets and occasions, to stretch the boundaries of soups and provide on the go solutions as well as other veggie-based dishes like veggie smoothies, purees etc.) merchandised either ambient or in the chiller, and working well in e-commerce. At the same time, we are caring about the current core keeping it fresh and vibrant.  

In Knorr we believe that we can change the world, by changing what we put on our plate, and Wet Soups portfolio transformation is fully focused on putting this Brand Purpose in life. We make sure that our soups are 100% natural, nutritious, vegetarian or vegan, and rich in vegetables that are grown sustainable by our partners farmers - good for people, and good for the planet!

As Assistant Brand Manager, you will be working alongside the Platform Leader, working on developing competitive innovations and transformative rejuvenations relevant to consumers, alongside outstanding on-pack, digital and TV communication, to deliver strong mixes and portfolio plans to EU markets and drive category and brand growth, while staying true to the Brand Purpose. This is a unique opportunity to lead project workstreams independently and add huge value to the brand and categories, so would ideally suit a marketeer with proven project management experience, who wants to grow working on purposeful products and diverse projects.  

The successful candidate must be able to work independently, create and maintain great relationships virtually with cross category teams and our lead markets all over Europe and have a strong attention to detail. We are looking for someone with naturally proactive attitude. The role offers plenty of scope for creativity and independent leadership on smaller workstreams, as well as clearly ownable deliverables on projects.  

WHAT WILL YOUR MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES BE? 

You will be on a mission to transform the Wet soups platform: 

• Take ownership, lead and project manage innovation/renovation/5S initiatives, working closely with the cross-functional and country teams to bring products to market OTIF, including developing pack design and work with the Global team on communication assets. This will need excellent project management skills and strong relationship-forming with cross functional teams. 
•  Embody the Innoflex innovation approach and mindset, to help deliver relevant and impactful innovation to market at speed. Includes creation of 100-day reviews and Post-Launch evaluations, managing project budget and adopting the Innoflex mindset when planning consumer research and testing. 
• To be a true leader for the business, responsible for business performance, as well as creating relevant presentations using performance and competitive analysis, consumer insight and research, to enable winning against competition and delivering on category full year growth targets.  
•  Support EU Platform leads in developing and implementing share-winning category strategy, tapping into category understanding, food trends across different segments and deep understanding of consumer changing eating habits. 
•  Champion competitive and entrepreneurial behaviour and mindset throughout the business and translate it into targeted portfolio transformation activities that grow Unilever Foods’ share in market.  
•  Drive day to day contact with local markets to support them in bringing our category mixes and category plans to life.  

  SKILLS YOU SHOULD HAVE 

•    Experienced and ambitious talent, with capability in leading cross functional innovation projects, ensuring they are aligned to market requirements and to global/regional strategy
•    Genuine passion/interest in food is highly desirable
•    Capability to learn fast as well as a real proactivity and autonomy in their own development - learning as much as they can about Unilever and Marketing as a function, as well as our ways of working, while bringing new entrepreneurial ways of thinking out of the box and healthily pushing the system boundaries. 
• Strong project management skills (key for this role), high numeracy and data analysis for insight development. 
•  Capability to make the complex simple, with strong communication and presentation abilities
•   Appetite for portfolio transformation and wanting to have immediate impact in the market. 
•   Resilience in the face of setbacks. Solution oriented.
•    A willingness to invest to build networks both in-person whilst also being capable to foster relationship remotely 
•   Passion for people and for brands, be able to demonstrate the Unilever Standards of Leadership and champion the consumer, shopper and customer in everything they do.  
•   Passion about Digital and Social media and ability to learn further and leverage these skills in category projects.  
•   Fluent English is a must, some French is beneficial 

EXPERIENCE YOU SHOULD HAVE 

• Experience in Marketing environment, ideally FMCG Central Marketing or Local Marketing is a must, experience in Unilever is beneficial
• Proven experience in Project Management 
• Some experience with the key Unilever systems: Innoflex / IPM; Prisma; BLUE. 
  
   

Disclaimer

Diversity at Unilever is about inclusion, embracing differences, creating possibilities, and growing together for better business performance. We embrace diversity in our workforce. This means giving full and fair consideration to all applicants and continuing development of all employees regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity