Brand Manager

Position Overview:

At American Licorice Company, the Brand Manager, Sour Confections creates growth opportunities by understanding, influencing and satisfying consumer desires. The Brand Manager, Sour Confections is a business leader and entrepreneur within the company, primarily overseeing the sour candy brands. The individual in this role is passionate about fostering happy consumer experiences by creating value streams and maximizing the contribution of value streams. The position calls for a fast learner who is open to change. This is a role that requires involvement in the details but also big picture, strategic thinking. The Brand Manager facilitates decision making in a wide variety of areas, including positioning, product, packaging, promotion, placement and pricing. This associate is persuasive with cross-functional teams to achieve business objectives, communicating their vision of brands, products and consumers. This position requires skill and experience in deriving actionable insights from technical, quantitative and qualitative data. When minimal data is available, the Brand Manager calls upon a well-developed intuition to lead the business forward. This individual is responsible for delivering short-term and long-term sales and profit goals for their assigned brands. Finally but fundamentally, the Brand Manager cultivates an attitude of continuous improvement with regard to their work and within the company as a whole, which values problem identification and problem solving.

Essential Job Functions:

• The Brand Manager, Sour Confections engages in cycles of learning and improving, which involves planning, doing, checking and adjusting, continuously repeating those steps to improve performance:

• Planning
• Identifies brand problems and understands the root cause of those problems
• Creates strategic brand marketing plans for assigned brands, including objectives, positioning, strategies, product, pricing, packaging, placement and promotion
• Develops and distributes timelines for programs or collaborates with others to do so
• Questions plans, possibilities and apparent obstacles, asking “why?” to better understand problems and proposed solutions
• Draws insights, implications and recommendations from quantitative & qualitative data, including internal shipment data, IRI scan, NPD Group, focus groups and quantitative consumer tracking studies
• Performs competitive analysis reviews and makes recommendations based on findings
• Collaborates with Consumer Research in developing, implementing and analyzing market research projects
• Provides top-down sales forecasts for all assigned brands

• Doing
• Leads development of brands as businesses within the company, following the milestones established in the Business Development Group’s Annual Business Planning Process
• Makes frequent strategic and tactical business decisions to enhance brand and product performance and achieve larger company goals; ensures program quality, timeliness and costs meet or exceed performance standards
• Shares engagement and passion for brands with all stakeholders in a persuasive manner: Communicates brands’ vision, strategies and plans to senior management, associates in Business Development Group, Operations and Information Services as well as agencies, consultants, customers and others as appropriate; represents Consumer Marketing POV’s internally with other departments
• Maintains Price Lists and recommend pricing changes based on market conditions and competitive behavior
• Manages SKU List, overseeing products throughout the entire brand lifecycle
• Serves as the company’s internal expert on youth trends and psychology (especially ages 6 to 24) by immersing in youth culture and using other appropriate information to understand the complexities and dynamics of this group
• Advocates for assigned brands’ quality within the organization, using consumer feedback and insights to guide discussions; supports the Consumer Response Group/QA team to satisfy consumer desires and ensure happy consumer experiences
• Provides art direction, understanding graphic design development and the terminology used by designers, pre-press and printers; attends press checks as appropriate
• Provides creative direction in development of consumer communications; generates effective strategic creative briefs and ensures follow-through
• Manages brand P&L’s and brand expenditure budgets; manages financial resources to maximize marketing activity for assigned brands; propose brand budgets that deliver superior ROI

• Checking
• Diagnoses problems with execution; monitors the impact of all brand activities, from shopper experience through the final eating experience, against program objectives and benchmarks; analyzes quantitative and qualitative data to measure program effectiveness and ROI, including but not limited to IRI, NPD Group, focus groups, tracking studies and financial data
• Collaborates with Consumer Research, Public Relations and others as needed to evaluate performance of brand programs

• Adjusting
• Makes recommendations of how to solve problems and improve brand programs, using insights gleaned from the doing and checking stages
• Learns from past performance and the experiences of others to improve planning, doing and checking stages in the future

• Direct Reports: None

• Travel: Approximately 25% of the time, averaging three to five days per month to La Porte, Indiana

Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree; MBA or other advanced degree preferred
• Four to seven plus years of progressive marketing management experience in a CPG company; Top 100 Food and Beverage brand management experience with P&L responsibility desirable
• Experience creating and executing strategic marketing plans for established brands and new products
• Successful track record of growing brands with creative ideas
• Strong experience in MS Office and IRI/Nielsen scan data required; NPD Group and custom research experience desirable

Physical Job Description: