Innovations Manager at Diageo

Purpose of Role

This is an extraordinary opportunity to work and shape the future of KBL; one of the leading organizations in Kenya. You will embrace this challenge & demonstrate a burning passion for consumers, creative judgement, innovative thinking balanced with a black-belt in launch execution. The Innovation Manager will lead the thought leadership to execution of scalable new launches that deliver against KBL’s growth priorities.

The role will require you to:

• Lead Product Innovation: Based on consumer insights, lead the development of Concepts, Design & Communications for new brand launches & brand extensions on existing brands. Complete this through the GATE (approval) process, influencing & inspiring the organization behind your vision. Work in partnership with the Supply brand change managers and Commercialization Managers to develop and commercialize the product innovation.
• Build Purposeful Winning Brands that are built in culture to win the hearts & minds of consumers. You will need to inject your creative flair alongside to applying creative judgement to evaluate brand communication and associated content & come up with innovative & integrated launch campaign
• Use Insights to sell More- Leverage consumer and customer understanding to generate insights on consumer behavior that successfully deliver innovations uptake and great commercial execution. Working closely with media and digital you will ensure that the launch strategy is advised by trends and big shifts that reflect consumer behavior.
• Sensibly Deliver Integrated Execution- Writing briefs that inspire internal and external partners to create breakthrough and radical ideas that enable the new launches to be established in culture, drive rapid awareness, trial and achieve fame on time and within budget.
• Forge powerful partnerships- develop productive and mutually exciting relationships with agencies, GBT, cross functional teams to enable us to achieve set goals and brand vision
• Be Entrepreneurial: You will constantly seek new insights and make connections to identify and turn opportunities into reality. Be imaginative
• Project Management- You will be working on multiple projects/launches concurrently and this requires a high level of structure, difficulty, and self-discipline to ensure that launches take place on time
• Demonstrate Strong team leadership It is critical that you can effectively influence & inspire the cross-functional project team to deliver the ambition. This means forging genuine relationships, holding tough conversations when needed & above all to be an expert in inspiring the business to the opportunity the innovation has for the business in the future.
• Performance management: Through a strong understanding of the business and the relative commercial levers required to deliver the performance ambitions you will consistently measure and intervene to make sure all new launches deliver set critical metrics. Timely escalations and course correction based on judgement from the performance tracking

Qualifications & Experience Required:

• You have 4+ years of consumer marketing or innovation experience & have a consistent track record of amazing results.
• You will demonstrate meticulous project management, strong marketing judgement & commercial grounding to ensure delivery of plans.
• You will have strong entrepreneurial flair to both identify new opportunities & navigate your project challenges through the complex business landscape.
• A great communicator, you build strong interpersonal networks within the business & have the ability to handle partners in a clear concise manner.
• You are comfortable leading complexity and ambiguity with a demonstrated track record of handling an agenda of multiple priorities & partners, juggling multiple projects & complex project timeline.
• You demonstrate drive, delivery & determination. Resilience is key! The ideal candidate be result oriented with a track record of consistently delivering strong performance.
• Line management & leadership. Leading, inspiring & coaching cross functional team members and 3rd party agencies.
• Educated to Graduate level in a business-related field.