Assistant Brand Innovation Manager ,UK & I

Job description

Salary: Up to £36,000 depending on experience, plus excellent benefits.

Business Context and Main Purpose of the Job

Unilever is home to some of the UK's biggest and most-loved brands, all of which help people look good, feel good and get more out of life every day.

We have an Assistant Brand Innovation Manager role (WL1C) available in our Foods division with the potential to work across our entire brand portfolio.

In Foods, we take the view that building depth of experience across the various aspects of the marketing mix is essential in the development of future ‘T Shaped' leaders. Therefore this role has a duality, whereby a proportion of time will be spent crafting powerful Brand Experiences and a proportion bringing Category and Brand strategy to life through innovation.

Key objectives of the marketing team overall are as follows:

1. To assist in delivering sustainable growth of the UKI Foods brands through building brilliant brand experiences and delivering portfolio and channel transformation.



Brand Experience

This part of the role is focused typically on a single brand, building a depth of understanding of it and its consumers that allows the creation of world class brand experiences, facilitated through data and precision marketing. The subsequent brand equity growth will be measured via key brand health metric's and P&L delivery.

Category Strategy and Innovation Acceleration

This part of the role focusses on depth of knowledge of category strategy building on understanding of Food Trends and brand innovation building on in depth understanding of changing consumer needs and NRM programmes. Through a deep understanding of the innovation process and an ability to efficiently project manage initiatives through the Unilever network, the KPI's for this role are based on delivering better and faster innovation funnel, Net Revenue Realisation and the delivery of the Foods 12QTR plan OTIF.

Key responsibilities

· Champion Lean like a start up innovation approach and mind-set to help deliver faster and more relevant innovation to market.
· Champion competitive and entrepreneurial behaviour and mind-set throughout the business and translate it into targeted innovation activities to grow Unilever Foods share in market
· Support Innovation Accelerator lead in developing share winning category strategy tapping into category understanding, food trends across different segments and deep understanding of consumer changing eating habits
· Take ownership, lead and manage projects
· Innovation/renovation/Net Revenue Realisation projects working closely with the innovation engine to bring products to market OTIF including creating trade stories. This will need excellent project management skills and working closely with cross functional teams
· Implement 12-18 month portfolio roadmap including product and format innovation and channel specific portfolio
· Manage innovation budget and adopt a start up mind-set when planning consumer research and testing
· Support building an Innovation Acceleration team that is future focused

2.To be a true leader for the business, using competitive analysis, consumer insight and research to ensure UKI Foods is winning against the competition and delivering on its full year growth targets. What we are looking for in a successful candidate is:

· The ability to work confidently with multiple cross functional teams across geographies, with strong communication, presentation and stakeholders influencing abilities.
· A successful candidate must have strong project management skills, high numeracy and data analysis for insight development. Strong project management skill is key for this specific role
· They will have a passion for brands, be able to demonstrate the Unilever Standards of Leadership and champion the consumer, shopper and customer in everything they do. A sense of curiosity is key in understanding the people we serve at a deeper level
· A successful candidate will be able to demonstrate their deep sense of creativity and logic, ambition, organisational and analytical skills, a head for figures and great instincts, along with a desire to get stuck in and actually make things happen through their can do attitude.
· Resilience, team orientation, ability to navigate through ambiguous and complex situations and taking initiatives are key
· Being ambitious to learn as well as a real proactivity in their own development - learning as much as they can about Unilever and Marketing as a function as well as bringing new start up ways of thinking and behaving
· In addition the right candidate will be highly motivated and capable of leaning in to support the team on wider portfolio tasks.
· Presentation skills
Company Overview


Unilever is a global Fast-Moving Consumer Goods company in the UK and Ireland. We are already on target to achieve our huge ambition to double the size of our business globally whilst reducing our environmental impact. We are growing our business and also doing what is right for our consumers, community and environment. We are developing brands for people's lives today and for the changing environment tomorrow - making sustainable living commonplace.

Working at Unilever means that you get to take part in this exciting journey and work with amazing people who are passionate about our large portfolio of famous brands. We want to improve billions of lives and you too can join us in making a consistent difference.

Application Process

Online Application >> Digital Interview >> Face to face Interview >> Job Offer

Please note: as part of the job application, you will be asked to complete pre-screening questions. Completion of the pre-screening questions are mandatory in order to be considered. Please allow yourself plenty of time to complete both the application and pre-screening questions. If the pre-screening questions are partially answered or not at all, it will adversely affect the progress of your application. Please be aware that you will have to complete the pre-screening questions at once as you will be unable to return to it later.