"You're the One Steering the Ship"
Suzanne is a product manager currently working for Kraft through our New York office. As is the case with many people who work with Aquent, Suzanne's choice to work as a contractor came at a midpoint of her career rather than at the beginning. As she puts it, Aquent gives her the opportunity to "keep up her skills and get experience with great companies without the pressure of a full-time position."
Not that Suzanne is any stranger to said pressure. On the contrary, she's managed brands that generated tens of millions in revenues and in her role at Beiersdorf Inc. launched 34+ new products & upgrades (including one that became and remains #1 in its category). In other words, she knows what it's like to have P&L responsibility and spend 50% of your time traveling. It was just that after getting to the point where she was heading the Global New Product Development efforts for a $79 million healthcare product line, it became clear that the next step for her was to assume the role of director. Instead, she decided to pursue a different course working on some of her own product ideas and pursuing her interest in theater. Working with Aquent gives her the necessary flexibility to do just that.
It took Suzanne a while to get to this point. Starting out in Marketing Research generating consumer insight data for Unilever, she soon realized she wanted a bigger role. "I like to see the whole story," she says. Continuing her research work at Cadbury Schweppes, her boss soon told her, "You can go anywhere you want here." She took that vote of confidence and segued into a Field Marketing position serving as a conduit between marketing and sales in support of store-level execution of programs and promotions. This experience taught her an important lesson: "If you want to get to know how to get a product on the shelf, you have to work closely with sales."
During her tenure in this role, Suzanne generated a lot of data and practical insights that were not only used to grow the business in her region but ended up being used nationally. She thus came to the attention of other business leaders and when an Associate Brand Manager position opened up, she was invited to take it.
Her career in product and brand management began in earnest. Fortunately, her prior experience and natural inclinations had prepared her well for the role. "In brand marketing, you have to be able to think creatively, conceptually, and analytically. You watch the Nielsen and IRI scanner data to identify gaps and weaknesses in your brand's performance. Then you start asking questions. 'Where are we weak and why? Where are we strong?' Then you need to figure out if it's a question of improving distribution or of improving your product line-up via upgrades or innovation."
Each solution brings with it its own set of challenges and Suzanne quickly discovered that product management is "command central." "You're the one who sees the big picture and you need to be able to communicate that to your team." Of course, she found that it's not only a matter of good communication, product management also requires leadership and diplomacy. "You've got to coordinate the whole thing and we're each dependent on each other. You depend on package engineering, the graphics department, manufacturing, and everyone in between. Does your sales team understand the offering and how to get it on the shelves? If Wal-Mart or CVS wants to sell our product, can we get enough to them on time? And then on top of it all, are we going to hit our sales numbers and our profit goals? In the end, it's your responsibility. You're the one steering the ship."
As it turned out, Suzanne was well-suited for the task -"It uses all my parts!" - and thus far has had many more "thrills than disappointments." "People in marketing are very results oriented and it's not just about the data telling you how you're doing. It feels good to see your products on the shelf. It might sound funny but, after I launched a new candy line for Cadbury in England, I actually got a kick out of seeing a discarded wrapper on the sidewalk. I thought, 'Wow, people are actually buying it!'"
And if "people are actually buying it" isn't music to a product manager's ears, then I don't know what is!
