About us

We're a truly international company, fourth largest in our industry and operating across 119 markets. An inclusive, innovative global FMCG business supported by 26,000 employees. As we embrace a new era of growth, we are transforming. Our ways of working and culture are driven by a challenger mindset, constantly questioning the status quo where people can bring their best selves to work. Our agility and collaboration are driving our ambitions, innovation and success all supported by our award-winning development programmes that creates exciting and rewarding career opportunities for all.

As we move forward, our consumers will be at the heart of what we do, evolving to needs and expectations and committing to a more meaningful contribution to harm reduction by building a successful NGP business. Integral to our long-term success is our sustainability strategy, behaving responsibly and supporting our ambitions, all underpinned by high governance.

Encouraging inclusion at local levels and supporting a developing and robust diversity agenda globally, we’re fully committed to creating and maintaining an environment that celebrates and respects difference.

The Role

A new role working within the NGP & Discovery Innovation pillar’s of Imperial’s central Global Consumer Office function, reporting to the NGP Director and a dotted line into the Head of Discovery.  This role will have a global remit and will be part of the team specifically responsible for identifying disruptive future innovation opportunities for Imperial. This includes:

1. Scope new consumer territory and business opportunities, identify ideas spanning multiple categories and brands, develop concepts, assess market size and lead the innovation beyond the existing product and brand portfolio to build business cases.
2. Identify partners in consumer segment exploration and product idea generation for rapid and disruptive innovation.
3. Create an eco-system to support new business case building in collaboration with external and internal partners.
4. Hand over ideas to Category teams for inclusion in pipeline

Additional Information

The Discovery Team is responsible for identifying and developing cross-category opportunities and themes to potentially disrupt existing business models or enter adjacent categories, including driving forward the organisation’s ESG and Healthier Future agenda. To have impact on the innovation programme, the Discovery Marketing Manager needs to:

• Demonstrate curiosity, motivated by blue ocean/open field mentality to find way forward among ambiguity and connect dots, be comfortable with operating in less structured environments and creating new business models.
• Knowledge on agile practices and especially Design Thinking and Lean Start-up approaches. This is critical for fast learning and pivot to define opportunities among ambiguity.
• Be able to take a strategic and long-term view to map the future innovation (5+ years thinking).
• Working closely with R&D team on technology and collaboration with insights and sales teams inside the company and outside. A collaborative mindset, excellent influencing and team building skills are also relevant characteristics.

As this role is also part of the NGP team it will be able to leverage Marketing and Category capability and expertise from its peers across the wider NGP community.

Principal Accountabilities

Facilitating development of the innovation funnel:

• Support identification of novel innovation opportunity spaces by leveraging consumer, competitor, technology, and market insights.
• Identify and articulate unmet consumer needs and new demand shifts to support development of ideas within innovation opportunity spaces
• Incubate emerging category ideas into concepts to fulfil business needs.
• Assess market size, look for opportunities of new business cases in terms of supporting behavioural change to healthier solutions and higher profitability for new generation products.
• Support development of the BOSCARD for category ideas.
• Leverage holistic understanding of the business strategy to define & prioritise future innovation opportunities.
• Create documents and presentations collating market & consumer insights to shape the innovation pipeline.
• Support the Head of Discovery to identify, build, and continually optimise the Discovery approach and capabilities needed to support the overall innovation strategy and projects within the pipeline.

Developing partnerships:

• Create a partnership ecosystem to enable innovation and new business cases.
• Focus on consumer segmentation exploration, innovation approach, and business building partners.]

KPIs:

• Consumer demand space, cross-category or emerging category opportunities.
• Number of qualified innovation opportunities.
• Number of new business cases.
• Sufficiency of innovation portfolio vs. business objectives.
• Market share growth due to innovation.

Key Relationships

Internal (excluding direct team and manager)

• Innovation and R&D
• Global Consumer Officer teams
• Global Science and Regulatory Affairs
• Regional market leadership
• Group strategy
• Finance
• Procurement
• Global Supply Chain
• Legal
• HR

External

• Innovation and ideation agencies
• Third party innovation delivery partners
• External Accelerators
• Starts up
• Digital partners
• Suppliers
• External peer network

Skills & Experience

Essential:

Education

• Educated to degree level in relevant field. Preferred in insights/business & administration/ Marketing with good understanding of innovation, marketing, digital & tech spaces
• Possible also a technical background with experience on business

Skills

• Collaboration
• Stakeholder management
• Innovation
• Marketing
• New product development
• Digital

Experience

• Delivering innovation and / or Marketing in an FMCG environment
• Driving growth through innovation particularly through the identification of new/untapped opportunities and solutions which truly deliver against these
• Leveraging consumer, market and competitor insights to deliver compelling propositions
• Leveraging research skills, continual horizon scanning and technology scouting to identify innovation opportunities (including Open Innovation)
• Briefing, compiling and evaluating intelligence from internal sources e.g. direct colleague feedback and external sources e.g. consumers, the market and competitive activities to identify cross category opportunities and themes
• Building strong collaborative and influential relationships with a range of stakeholders

 

Desirable:

Qualifications

• 5+ years’ experience in discovery, innovation roles and / or Marketing roles

Skills

• New Business models
• Consumer behavioural change

Experience

• Delivering ideation and innovation in a tobacco and / or NGP environment
• Delivering ideation and innovation in a pharmaceutical and wellbeing environment
• Delivering ideation in a food environment

What we offer

Imperial Brands offer a competitive package of salary, bonus scheme, pension and 25 days holiday (with an additional 4 days on top to cover the Christmas period and bank holidays) and hybrid work.

 

Next steps

Interested applicants should apply with their CV highlighting their suitability for the role.