CTI (Consumer Technical Insights) - Assistant Manager

Unilever is currently hiring for a BWPC Ass Manager: CTI

Reports to: Deo, fragrance and CTI manager – 1UL SNA

Scope: 1UL SnA Markets

Location: South Africa -Durban or Johannesburg based at Head Office site

Terms & Conditions: Full time employment

With 3.4 billion people in over 190 countries using our products every day, Unilever is a business that makes a real impact on the world. Work on brands that are loved and improve the lives of our consumers and the communities around us. We are driven by our purpose: to make sustainable living commonplace, and it is our belief that doing business the right way drives superior performance. At the heart of what we do is our people – we believe that when our people work with purpose, we will create a better business and a better world. 

At Unilever, your career will be a unique journey, grounded in our inclusive, collaborative, and flexible working environment. We don’t believe in the ‘one size fits all’ approach and instead we will equip you with the tools you need to shape your own future.

Beauty & Personal Care Consumer Technical Insights (CTI)

The Beauty & Wellbeing and Personal Care business units are dedicated to providing consumers with a desirable product at competitive prices whilst making sustainable living commonplace. Our focus is on accessibility and purpose-driven brands through solving real consumer pain points and offering products and services that add true value to our Southern African consumer enabling both top and bottom line growth.  Within Research and Development function, the Consumer Technical Insights role is at the heart of the consumer led journey and forms an integral part of mix understanding, sketchbook building within projects partnering with marketing and CMI and bringing in knowledge form global and local insigts on both consumer behaviours and product insights. 

JOB PURPOSE

In this role, you will turn consumer insights into strong product claims, better product design, and engaging demos and experiences. You will stay close to consumer needs, trends, and behaviour across the full consumer journey and product life cycle, so we can communicate our technology in a clear, consistent way and help our brands win in the market.

WHAT WILL YOUR MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES BE

• REFINING CLAIMS processes & Claims Roadmap areas:

  • Work with the capability lead, technical project leads and BPC leadership in delivering consumer winning claims across all selling and  communication channels signed at relevant clearance forums and maintained within digital auditable claims framework.

• Partner with and input into BG Claims and  BU/BGMarketing to build consumer winning claims roadmaps that shape innovation plans, using consumer centric language, smart support and fast, high-quality testing.

• Support winning product mixes through ethical test-and-learn, best-in-class tools and data models that speed learning and strengthen product education.

• Unlock sensory winning aspects aligned to consumer desire with relevant models, language and feed into global platforms for timely mix lock.

• Be a multiplier.

  • Step change the capability to Maximise Product Impact agenda by creating and unlocking agencies and external partners that maximise demos, stories and content that bring our technology and benefits to life and improve customer engagement and democrtise best practices across all in R&D SNA BPc.

  • Embed consumer insights into R&D and project teams so BPc work stays consumer-led, market relevant and demonstrated business winning at Innoflex gates.

• Build agile research methods to sharpen performance understanding, uncover new needs and keep communication strong across the innovation lifecycle.

Enhance story telling

• Unlock new ways to monitor all consumer led platforms partnering with Quality, CMI,  Brand and social media agencies to comb big data and aid in always on responses, proactive ‘others say’ opportunies and feed back into the product cycle.

• Partner with BU CMI to turn consumer/shopper insights into clear product and packaging stories that build superiority and drive growth; sales listngs, more communication in more channels and feed the ‘Others Say” claims agenda as the transition moves from Brand say aligned with demand creation.  Clear business impact demontratable.

• Continous learning & team support

  • Keep building future-ready skills; share knowledge, support new joiners and help the team deliver.

  • Delvery through others, ensuring consistency and quality in delivery across R&D and working within teams of R&D and key business partners with speed through seeking out global best practices and ensuring relevance to big data compliance. 

  • Understanding that data generated in SnA or on global brands needs to be of the right format for data pools and globally usable whilst

Fragrance

• Execute and amplify new Fragrance introductions - ensure new fragrance introductions are managed smoothly enable best in class execution, claims and positioning

• Lead Olfactive Mapping and Understanding in the regions - play a key role in ensuring the relevance of olfactive insights and stay current with consumers and the trends in the market

Social First

• Lead, support and be in-trend on how R&D can support the Social First content calendar.

•  Build capability across teams and coach teams to create social first content

WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED

Experiences & Qualifications

• Qualifications: Bachelor’s Degree or higher in a Physical or Social Science field (e.g. Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Psychology). 

• Experience: a broad body of relevant working experience with a proven track record on delivery, ideally in Claims and/or Consumer Insights. 

• Excellent communicator/influencer with strong reasoning skills. 

• Proven track record of developing new consumer insights/claims & communication capabilities in a more agile, digitally enabled manner.

• Strong statistical and analytical data skills to leverage test data to the business benefit inclusive of partnering internally and externally to ensure timely data is generated for impact.

• Experience of working in multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural teams with strong cross-functional collaboration skills will be advantageous

• Extensive experience of developing, inputting globally and landing complex claims support strategies, leveraging technical literature, sensory, consumer, and clinical test data with an ability to democratize this skill and ensure governance is maintained across teams.

• Ability to identify and leverage consumer relevant testing, analysis, trend and insight ecosystems and testings spaces, external and internal panels and the establishment of these for business benefit

• Evidence of step changing this or a related field of work to a more digitally enabled business impact driven  environment with experience in Veeva and other digital tools

• Independently manage workstreams and time, with strong attention to detail. 

Skills

• Skill set for this role is mapped in the Unilever Degreed R&D role profile pathway and include but is not limited to: organisaltional awareness, technical communication, business acumen for R&D,data  governance, data analytics, consumer insighs, agile delivery, design for experience, digital tool proficiency, change management and innovation crafting

• Additonal expertise in StoryTelling, Consumer Truth and Expertise in new Technology communication and Insights, Creativity & Collaboration & Claims Development proess with relevant social media, PR event training and public engagements.

• Ability to standardise CTI work, train others and build external agencies to deliver elements whilst maintaining best practice.

Leadership

• You are energized by delivering fantastic results. You are an example to others – both your results and your resilience. You are constantly on the lookout for better ways to do things, engaging and collaborating with others along the way.

• As an individual you are the one responsible for your own wellbeing and delivering high standards of work. You must also focus on the Consumer and what they need. You are humble and have your head up, looking around to interpret evidence and data smartly, spot issues and opportunities to make things better.

• Aligned with the key Unilever behaviours of Care Deeply, Focus on what counts, stay three steps ahead and delver with excellence this role will require focus on the ability to prirotize business impactful work and a sharp sense of delivery including the ability to democratize it across team members ensuring consistency to high standards.

Unilever embraces diversity and encourages applicants from all walks of life! 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. 

Unilever is an organisation committed to equity, inclusion and diversity to drive our business results and create a better future, every day, for our diverse employees, global consumers, partners, and communities. We believe a diverse workforce allows us to match our growth ambitions and drive inclusion across the business. At Unilever we are interested in every individual bringing their ‘Whole Self’ to work and this includes you! Thus if you require any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at the time of your application so that we can support you through your recruitment journey.

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