AkzoNobel Vietnam ★ 4.1

** Develop and implement market research initiatives (category, consumers, competitors, customers, influencers) to support Marketing, Product Management and Commercial Excellence teams in making informed strategic decisions
• Identify knowledge gaps in the SESA region and propose necessary studies; help define/sharpen the marketing problems and action standards as basis for decision-making
• Initiate a joint portfolio of research studies based on business needs of strategic and tactical research projects and annual research strategy with Regional and local brand management teams
• Lead research and insights initiatives in SESA. Conceive, lead, and conduct qualitative and quantitative research studies; identifying and managing the right methodology and agency partners to work with, include in-house research where budget is unavailable.
• Support all regional and local marketing projects with adequate market research (Brand Health Study, Communication testing, Concept Test, Price Test, Market Sizing, Consumer/Shopper Insights, etc.)
• Project manage research initiatives from study design and inception through completion (brief, design, questionnaire development, data collection, analysis, reporting).
• Deliver research and insight projects, using both qualitative and quantitative methods using both traditional and digital research platforms, with a strong emphasis on delivering insights/results with impact.
• Actively partnering with digital teams to utilize Google trends, Google analytics, social listening tools, Adobe web analytics, social media engagement, e-Commerce reviews and/or email survey using 1st party database etc. to identify trends and build insights for influencing action points and strategy
• Interpret the research and competitive outcome and turn learning into insights and action points
• Compare, combine, and communicate consumer insights across categories to find relevant common themes and anticipate consumer need gaps
• Define consumer and technological opportunity areas to act as springboards for brand building ideas
• Become a Subject Matter Expert for categories and brands, creating scalable data-driven insights narratives to be leveraged across regional and local teams.

** Build, manage and improve a world class, competitive market intelligence database and system in the country
• Act as the key point of contact for SESA Marketing Organization to identify and execute research and insights needs
• Champion the implementation of a competitive intelligence database that gathers, shares, interprets and stores competitive data making it ready to use and easy to navigate
• Collect, synthesize and codify knowledge from public domain especially on social and economic trends, category trends, innovations and/or category studies and select quality agency partners
• Record, synthesize and codify all local and international primary, secondary and syndicated market research findings and insights and feed them back to regional. Incorporate regional and relevant international findings into the local intelligence database.
• Liaise closely with experts (on trends or category) to predict future mainstream trends and record into database
• Make consumer and market learning readily accessible to the relevant employees and restrict usage of confidential information

** Actively contribute to and align with global research initiatives
• Collaborate with Global Head of Insights on insights agenda; contribute local inputs and coordinate local implementation
• Share and align the regional market research calendar with regional plans to SESA key stakeholders and Country Marketing Heads
• Contribute to regional reports and updates, sharing insights, findings and information from local market

** Administration of Market Research
• Negotiate project cost with the shortlisted agencies, together with Procurement
• Together with Marketing, review and sharpen the discussion guidelines and/or questionnaires and provide the most adequate stimulus material
• Manage budget according to plan
• Manage and evaluate agency partners and ensure they understand the AkzoNobel business and quality standards, and complies accordingly

** Analysis of market, marketing and sales data to influence growth direction
• Collect, analyse, process and publish the data required for Marketing Strategy development which include perform market analysis, category and brand analysis, traditional and digital media performance analysis etc.
• Independently analyzes key data elements supporting individual Projects or Programs (eg. Campaign effectiveness); captures data through Interviews, 3rd party tracking, web tracking, sales feedback etc. Ensure data integrity and correct data whenever necessary
• Be passionate about working with big data to define, implement and monitor business KPIs, as well as to provide data driven insights to the business and Brand Managers
• Reporting, analysis and insights: Partner with Commercial Excellence to build dashboards on Power BI to track performance, derive insights, understand growth levers and communicate recommendations via presentations to stakeholders

** Build Knowledge and Insights capability within the organization
• Champion the insight capability across the company – building the skills, processes and tools needed to deliver strong actionable insights. These include
- making consumer/customer learning accessible to relevant employees; organize activities that enable relevant team members to interact and understand consumers/ customers more in-depth
- organize market information (industry, competition, recent developments) and research studies to make it accessible to relevant employees, eg, database, distribution of synthesized findings
• Take the stance of the ‘consumer/customer advocate’ during meetings/discussions
• Identify research competency gaps within Marketing team, and address these through suitable programs (training, knowledge sharing, attending/exposure to various researches, etc.)

** People, Organization and Learning Culture Development
• Closely collaborate with global, regional and local marketing and other functional teams to drive effectiveness
• Regularly review performance against targets and initiate improvement plan if necessary.
• Give input to the Regional Marketing Director, if any work processes need improvement