Director of Insights, Pet Portfolio

Headquartered in Lakeville, Minn., Post Consumer Brands, a business unit of Post Holdings, Inc., is dedicated to providing people and their pets with delicious food choices for every taste and budget. The company’s portfolio includes beloved brands such as Honey Bunches of Oats®, PEBBLES®, Grape-Nuts® and Malt-O-Meal® cereal, and Peter Pan® peanut butter, as well as Rachael Ray® Nutrish®, Kibbles ‘n Bits® and 9Lives® dog and cat food. As a company committed to high standards of quality and to our values, we are driven by one idea: To make lives better by making delicious food accessible for all. For more information about our brands, visit www.postconsumerbrands.com and follow us on LinkedIn for the latest news.

Post Consumer Brands recently acquired several iconic pet food brands, venturing into a new market while remaining true to our purpose to provide delicious and accessible food that our consumers love. We’re always searching the center store for the next exciting product to add to our portfolio, and right now, we’re growing and need passionate, driven individuals with diverse perspectives to help us reach greater heights. That’s where you come in. Join a team where your voice is not only heard but valued. Make a real impact on brands enjoyed by millions of people and their pets.

Post Consumer Brands corporate headquarters in Lakeville, Minn. is about 20 miles south of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Lakeville has all the benefits of smaller town living with access to everything a large metropolitan area has to offer. Join more than 400 team members collaborating on the two-building campus to help put breakfast on the tables of millions of consumers in North America. 

Reporting to the Chief Growth Officer, the Director Insights will lead all consumer insights efforts in support of the Post Pet business. The Pet portfolio includes some of the most iconic brands in the pet category including – Nutrish, Nature’s Recipe, Kibbles n’ Bit, 9 Lives &  Gravy Train.  

The leader of this team must act as the “Voice of the Consumer” to help support the brand management teams to provide consumer, category, competitive, and shopper insights and analysis as part of on-going brand management efforts for both the short term and longer term.  

Responsibilities will range across the entire market research continuum including consumer segmentation, attitude and usage, new product innovation, advertising development and refinement, business drivers, and marketing effectiveness. This role requires strong influencing and communication skills (written, verbal and visual), comfort working in a matrix environment and ability to balance multiple priorities and stakeholders. The ideal candidate will have advanced knowledge of custom research techniques, syndicated marketing intelligence sources, and a growth mindset with a strong aptitude for continuous learning. Experience with innovative and cutting-edge research methodologies and analytics is a plus.  

Responsibilities and Accountabilities 

The Director of Insights will drive value creation to the Post organization by bringing a “modern marketing” approach to insights that includes – (1) Uncovering consumer and shopper insights that help advantage our brands in the marketplace, (2) Providing “agile” support that helps teams answer their business questions at the “speed of business”, and most importantly (3) Delivering the “right tools for the right tasks” that help us deliver against our revenue, profit and market share objectives. 

This senior leader will play a critical role in the development & implementation of the strategic learning plan agenda, connecting and integrating across the entire Growth organization. This role will interface directly with other cross functional teams across the organization to ensure effective cross-pollination of knowledge and inform strategic initiatives using the power of data, analysis and insights. Providing thought-leadership to drive a more consumer centric organization will be critical to the success of this role.  

 
Primary Duties 

• Co-creates development of Pet Portfolio insights learning plan with marketing and innovation partners, identifying key knowledge gaps and insights driven opportunities and threats for the category and brands 

• Partner with Marketing and Innovation to enable brand equity building and consumer relationship building, recruitment and loyalty across portfolio/categories/brands 

• Develop and drive strategic presentations that incorporates the voice of the consumer and drives clear recommendation.  

• Lead a team that performs consumer insights and consumer analytics to deliver holistic answers to business questions 

• Develop strategic insights to support the creative brief process, early and late stage creative development, consumer co-creation, evaluation and testing 

• Champion the insights that help us build an innovation pipeline through opportunity identification, concept development and assessment, product and packaging development, early and late stage consumer co-creation, evaluation and testing 

• Devise, manage and deliver insights to support launch of new marketing campaigns, and support national selling stories and measurement of new product launches 

• Help create the right disciplines and frameworks to drive ongoing brand health in both the short term and longer term.  

 Qualifications:

• 10 or more years of leadership experience in consumer insight, market research/analysis and/or shopper insights with preference for innovation and creative development experience 

• Has built and grown a team of seasoned insights professionals  

• Drives the development of analytical tools, technology, and data acquisition plans while identifying and prioritizing investments for analytics, insights, and data management across the business portfolio/needs 

• Mastery of Market research techniques, holistic analysis and business question resolution. Able to tackle structured and unstructured problems coordinating all phases of analysis from formulation to conclusions / recommendations 

• Expertise in leading insights and analytics workstreams in partnership with marketing or sales teams, leveraging both primary and & secondary data sources 

• Comfortable with both large amounts of data, and qualitative insight, iterations with research and technology partners and able to design effective and efficient insight programs to address business questions 

• Able to conceptualize frameworks and research models for diverse marketing and consumer insights problems 

• Must be collaborative in nature, comfortable both contributing to and utilizing insights, strategies and activations around our network 

• Expertise in managing agency partners and negotiations 

 Work Location:  

• In-office, Lakeville, MN with a hybrid work schedule

Travel Requirements:  

• As needed 

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