Europe Beverages – Strategic

We are at an exciting time in Europe Beverages as we look to accelerate growth and build iconic brands as part of 
the new International Beverages Organisation. Are you passionate about influencing the future direction of the business, championing the consumer so we build winning portfolio of brands and inspiring innovations that will drive sustainable growth.

Do you have a curiosity to deeply understand consumer needs and behaviour and leverage these insights to catalyse category, portfolio and brand growth? If so, we have a great opportunity for you to join our team 
as a Strategic & Portfolio Insights Manager across Europe, albeit with a strong focus on the UK.

The Strategic and Portfolio Insights role sits at the forefront of driving impactful decision making and ensuring the portfolio growth strategy is built on strong consumer insights. The role is responsible for providing strategic direction to the business by extracting and presenting actionable insights from multiple data sets including consumer needs, future trends, and category opportunities to shape future business and brand strategy.

This role is end-to-end and strategic, identifying 'where to play' opportunities to accelerate growth, drive penetration and share of market, and/or increase profitability. This role needs to partner and influence multiple functions including the wider Insights team, Strategy and Transformation, Marketing, Finance, and franchise to  realise human-centric growth. The work will guide the business to execute 'how to win' solutions to ensure execution aligns with consumer strategy.
 
The role plays a pivotal role to enable to shape a 3-5 year vision, help define targets and strategic plan, act as both a subject matter expert and thought partner to the business and executive team, ensuring strategy is human centric, 
and is underpinned by world-class insights. This role will partner with global capabilities to influence development of insights tools to ensure they are relevant, actionable and offer incremental value.

In this role you will be working on a portfolio of brands including Pepsi, Pepsi Max, 7UP, Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Lipton, Sting and Rockstar. You'll work alongside leaders in Insights, Marketing, R&D, Strategy, Bottlers, Customers and research partners. You will fully leverage/ monetize our existing data and knowledge, and also design and execute human-centric research, to drive scalable, advantaged and actionable insights to accelerate growth across our portfolio at PepsiCo.

Co-developing future-proofed strategies to support the Strategic and Business planning processes

• Deliver world class insights to develop and execute strategic plans that drive category and portfolio growth, volume growth, profitability and omnichannel acceleration
• Support strategic processes with human Insight and championing the category & portfolio level JTBD. Ensure the business is making consumer-centric planning decisions. Leveraging the insight frameworks to help guide opportunity identification and framing.
• Help the business develop winning plans against strategic growth opportunities through leveraging advanced insights and analytics

Analyse consumer shape of demand, identifying shifts in shopper behaviour and consumer occasions 

• Leverage and embed Demand Spaces to identify clear portfolio opportunities across markets
• Utilise advanced analytic tools and agencies to forecast demand, identify market gaps, and 
  capitalise on growth opportunities
• Facilitate teams in leveraging demand insights for strategic deep dives, customer meetings, 
  and category visions
• Stay abreast of consumer and category trends, competitive landscapes, and regulatory changes to 
  provide foresight guidance and course correct annual plans

Driving change through foundational human understanding & empathy

• Proactively identify gaps in consumer understanding that are aligned to the IB's big rocks/ strategic plan. Leverage a wide toolkit to uncover human and behavioural truths including syndicated, scan, retail, consumer quantitative and qualitative, behavioural science, etc.  
• Manage initiatives to close the gap in understanding, develop collaborative workshops and engagements to manage change/ bring stakeholders along
• Develop compelling and visual strategic frameworks that create broad understanding, provide 
  clarity of the opportunity, and inspire them to action
• Train and guide internal and external teams to deliver powerful analysis, category, consumer and brand insights
• Beverage global and regional insights tools, adapting to local needs and possibilities, and where need help build, standardize and automate new tools
• Build & manage strong relationships with best-in-class Insights Agencies, to drive superior partnerships, enable productivity, and continuously stretch the Insights agenda for PepsiCo.

Experience Required:

• 5-10 years' experience across top tier strategy consulting and/or FMCG insights.
  Experience of contributing to a strategic insights agenda and partnering cross functionally to drive insights to action.
• Experience in leading/managing strategy consulting initiatives or insights projects.
• Experience in a consulting capacity, or consultative role, leveraging advanced problem solving and analytical skills to influence at a high level.
• Fluent English.

Key Skills:

• E2E Strategic operator – able to think broadly, identify the business question/problem, develop a clear brief, manage the analysis through to implications, influence decision makers and to drive a tangible business impact
• Courageous self-starter, able to operate independently, proposed new thinking/approaches and step out of your comfort zone to embrace challenges.
• Ability to simplify complexity and communicate in a compelling, clear and concise manner
• Story-telling and presentation skills to turn data into impactful insights and credible POVs to land impactful, persuasive stories and strategies
• Ability to synthesize highly complex findings to focus on the critical issues and actionable growth opportunities
• Ability to see connections across different data & insight sources from category consumption, brands drivers, macro & micro trends, and future forces of consumer and shopper change.
• Comfortable with a wide sets of data (scan, quantitative, qualitative) knowing both their strengths and constraints and using all of them to build a well rounded, holistic story
• Ability to compliment quantitative data with qualitative data to understand the WHAT, WHY and HOW in developing a portfolio strategy.  Ensuring behavioural economic principles (consumer behaviour) are driving recommendations.
• Ability to size and forecast size of a business opportunity.  Which includes fluency in quantitative data (e.g. Retail/Scan/Market data, demand and occasion survey data, Kantar and NielsenIQ data, trend data, etc.)
• Actively creates, promotes, and fosters a culture of one team and collaboration to get things done.
• Networking – able to engage cross-functionally, globally and externally with different partners to leverage work, capabilities and pockets of expertise
• Commercially savvy individual who can build strong relationships and empathy with stakeholders and adopt an act as owners/consultancy mindset.
• Can mange a complex set of stakeholders and demands by being intentional and contracting on priorities with ruthless focus on delivering what was promised.
• Leadership and coaching - ability to inspire and motivate the extended team internally and in agencies to grow and develop, maximising engagement and unleashing potential/ the impact they can make.