Aspire Bakeries is a North American baking company with a leadership position in specialty frozen baked goods. Formed from leading bakery companies, its innovative food portfolio includes breads, artisan breads, buns, cookies, donuts, muffins and pastries from beloved brands like La Brea Bakery®, Otis Spunkmeyer®, and Oakrun Farm Bakery®. With 13 bakeries in North America, we are committed to driving innovation, predicting upcoming consumer trends and flavors, and exceeding our customers’ expectations. Aspire Bakeries champions the values of Integrity, Ownership, Customer Focus, Creativity and Care to help us deliver on People Safety, Food Safety, Quality and Collaboration.
Key Accountabilities
As the Marketing Manager, reporting into the Director, Retail Marketing, your role is to develop strategic business plans and marketing solutions to protect and grow Aspire Bakeries’ bakery products across multiple retail segments. The Marketing Manager will create long-term strategic plans and thought leadership across ISB and Deli segments with insights that help drive business growth, deliver sustainable growth strategies and tactics, serve as primary liaison to the cross-functional team, provide guidance on white space innovation opportunities, and provide direction and support to the Retail Customer Development teams.
The position requires strong advanced analytics and data-driven problem-solving capabilities to understand the omnichannel shopper journey. Background in online or offline sales analytics is required. The preferred candidate will also have fundamental shopper insight development skills and a history of triangulating compelling analytics and insights into concise story-telling presentations in support of retail category growth.
The individual must have the ability to engage cross-functional teams to uncover opportunities for the retailer and influence activation; collaborating closely internally with Customer Development, R&D, Project Management, Finance teams as well as directly with the retailer partner.
Responsibilities
- Manage the retail portfolio development and long term food strategy. This includes but is not limited to research data, identify business opportunities, and make recommendations to optimize strategies and tactics.
- Create and lead key shopper marketing processes, tools, templates and shares best practices to optimize planning, execution and analysis of all programs.
- Build and maintain multi-discipline relationships within the organization and with customers at the leadership level, including developing and delivering presentations to gain buy in and to drive results.
- Manage the introduction of new foods and continuous improvement of existing foods in collaboration with the Customer Development leads, R&D and Project Management.
- Complete alignment with Customer Development leads to provide sales support actions to support the teams in meeting our fiscal objectives. This includes developing appropriate sales communications for new items and marketing program launches including customer-facing presentation decks, sell sheets and sales collateral.
- Execute digital marketing as part of brand planning, development of creative assets, execution in market, and results measurement and assessment
- Work directly with agency partners to ensure robust social planning is in place across social channels, staying relevant with current topics and assessing results and optimizing plan.
- Work closely with data-partners, Technomic, Nielsen, NPD and Mintel, to provide the most up-to-date food category reviews, trends and insights.
- Gain deep understanding of Aspire Bakeries’ capabilities across retail to develop solutions and promotions to drive business growth in partnership with Customer Development leads and key retail customers.
Skills, Experience & Qualifications
- Position requires a Bachelor’s degree; marketing preferred
- 3-5 years of category management experience in the retail industry
- Demonstrate customer-facing insights leadership through analytical, behavior and attitudinal understanding of the retailer’s shoppers.
- Experience identifying key business issues and opportunities through sharp interpretation of POS/ePOS data (IRI, Nielsen, Mintel, etc.), household panel (Numerator, Nielsen), site analytics, overall digital shopping behavior and path-to-purchase.
- Strong written, oral and presentation skills are required.
- Prior experience in Brand Marketing, Customer Marketing, Shopper Marketing, Sales, Agency, Market Research, Shopper Insights or Category Management.
- We need someone who can think strategically, think conceptually as well as have skills around finance and analytics while driving results, selling and negotiating!
- Financial acumen related to managing a budget and ROI analysis
- Ability to leverage data and trends to generate insights, and ultimately solutions, that drive new shopper behaviors
- Demonstrate ability to collaborate and work well cross-functionally.
- Deep understanding of top US retailers and their go-to-market strategies
- Desire to work in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment
- Proficient in MS Office, specifically PowerPoint, Word and Excel
- 15%+ travel
At Aspire Bakeries, the health and safety of our associates is our number one priority. In fact, CARE is one of our Core Values. That’s why all offers of employment, where legally permitted, are contingent on the candidate showing proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to pass our pre-employment requirements.
Candidates may be legally entitled to a reasonable accommodation if the vaccine is medically contraindicated for them, a medical necessity requires a delay in vaccination, or because of a disability. Candidates may also be legally entitled to a reasonable accommodation if receiving the vaccine conflicts with a sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance. Requests for exemption and reasonable accommodation must be initiated by the candidate prior to date of hire.
- All medical information collected from candidates, including vaccination information and test results, obtained during the pre-employment process, will be treated in accordance with applicable laws and policies on confidentiality and privacy.
Aspire Bakeries is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.