B&W Global Trends and Beauty Academy Lead

Job Title: B&W Global Trends and Beauty Academy Lead

Location: 100 Victoria Embankment

JOB PURPOSE

Overview:

The PISD team connects the business group together and partners the Marketing leadership team in the key areas of Trends, Innovation, Design and Beauty Culture & Capability. All of this is done in close collaboration with the Design SVP, Global CMO, Brand Leads and BU leaders across the world.  Reporting to the Foresight, Design & Beauty Academy Director, this role is central to driving our beauty trends and capabilities agenda. You will have the opportunity to shape the strategic trends content created to drive the innovation strategies for B&W marketing and play a pivotal role in transforming the company’s expertise in beauty so that we become a true industry challenger.

Background/Context

As a newly formed transformational change team, we are putting significant investment into building connection within the team, they not only understand themselves, each other, but also their role in supporting the business strategy and delivering impact through our OKR’s.

The team values are centred around trust, transparency, honesty, authenticity, good intention, and which live out through the 4 Unilever Behaviours in the day-to-day execution.

It is critical for us that every member feels seen, heard and valued; we lean into the hard conversations with good intention to learn, adapt and improve. Making transparency and trust a core principle that the leadership team is nurturing as we build a strong foundation and transition through the stages of team formation.

We have a BOLD ambition, which is transformation at the core. To achieve this, we are re-writing long established processes and ways of working, thinking, educating, inspiring the cross functional teams and brands within which we work. Therefore, the profile of the talents we try to recruit, is critical; challenge the statu quo, dynamic, resilient, agile, solution finders beyond pure executant and of course crafters.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Beauty Academy

• Identify relevant trends and spaces in beauty to inform key topics covered within the Beauty Academy learning curriculum.
• Recruit & work closely with a network of beauty specialist agencies to develop and drive the capability programme.
• Understand the strategic grounding and priorities of B&W to ensure Beauty Academy content is aligned to the required transformation.
• Lead the deployment of Beauty Academy content through live face to face/virtual sessions and online content library ensuring the relevant content reaches the right teams across the organisation and that content is highly relevant and engaging.
• Build and maintain a strong relationship with central marketing excellence team to leverage relevant learnings and best practice to enhance the Beauty Academy curriculum.

B&W Foresight & Trend Deployment

• Trends Strategy: Lead the creation and implementation of a trend’s strategy for the PISD team to meet the core needs of the team: innovation, packaging design and sustainability.
• Content Development: You will work closely alongside external agencies and our internal R&D and CMI experts to create trends using your storytelling skills to ensure a cohesive narrative and the scientific and technical content is translated into language that is easily understood and actionable by the business.
• Support the hair and skincare design leads to interpret the macro innovation and design trends into more a specific ‘so what’ for our haircare and skincare brands.

Leadership

• Line manager supervision and coach two direct reports.
• Manage the trends and beauty academy budgets.
• Interconnect with the Brand Partner and Design Lead to shape and inform Beauty Academy into Action and InnoProf (Innovation Annual Global Showcase)
• Manage the ongoing relationships and performance feedback with account teams for trend and capabilities agencies
• Reporting line(s) into the Innovation Marketing Director of Hair, and the Innovation Marketing Director of Skin   

ALL ABOUT YOU

Key Skills:

• Proactive self-starter, accountable for defining, driving and owning the Strategy and Execution
• Excellent project management, planning and organisation skills.
• Ability to be able to juggle multiple projects and priorities, as well as demonstrating real ownership and accountability.
• Curiosity and passion for beauty and aesthetics with deep understanding of the skin/hair category and competitors.
• An outstanding communicator, relationship builder and influencer, capable of working effectively with counterparts of all work levels and across multiple cultures/countries and able to say no.
• Strong business acumen and strategic thinking that makes you performance orientated, able to sharply define priorities and execute with excellence.
• Strategic networker who can proactively seek out and create opportunities to expand their professional network and leverage these connections for capability or trends projects.
• Extremely high degree of attention to detail.

Key Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree with a significant level of experience of working in strategy or insights.
• Experience of leading innovation and brand strategy development, particularly in beauty.
• Demonstrated ability in the translation and understanding of scientific territories and the direct link and creation of a thread to innovation spaces
• A personal interest in keeping connected to the changing external world & evidence of being able to develop strategic trend content from various sources and delivering with impact to the business.
• A flair for beauty, fashion, art or design; having connections in this world is a plus.
• Proven track record of planning, organising and executing successful large events e.g. conferences, trade shows, corporate meetings or large social gatherings.
• Proven track record of leading a cross-functional team with an ability to be able to manage multiple projects in parallel.
• Previous insight or trends agency experience preferred.
• Line management experience and leading through change.

Top 3 Unilever Behaviours:

Consumer & Customer Love: We delight our consumers and partner our customers better than anyone else.

Behaviours:

• Spending time considering and understanding the needs of (internal and/or external) consumers, anticipating and translating future trends into viable strategies and solutions.
• Anticipating and meeting customer needs, seeking to move past the traditional ways of doing things, generating creative ideas and promoting innovative thinking in others to drive category growth.

Traits: Empathy, Curiosity and Need for achievement.

Drivers: None.

Purposeful Impact: We care deeply about delivering positive impact for people & planet.

Behaviours:  

• Purposeful decision maker: Considering all relevant information and multiple points of view, focusing on balancing competing needs and priorities when making decisions.
• Forward thinker: Thinking ahead and approach challenges using a broad perspective to create breakthrough strategies.

Traits: Curiosity, Focus, Persistence.

Drivers: None.

Agility: We are curious, courageous and adaptable to change.

Behaviours:

• ​​​​​​​Nimble Learner: Learning through experiences and experimentation and applying the lessons quickly through new situations.
• Change adaptor: Dealing comfortably with uncertainty and change, taking action and making tough decisions in high-stakes situations, and adapting your approach in response to changing circumstances.

Traits: Curiosity, Adaptability, Tolerance for ambiguity, Risk Taking.

Drivers: Structure (low).

Top 3 Essential Skills (from role profile):

• Ability to be able to juggle multiple projects and priorities, as well as demonstrating real ownership and accountability.
• An outstanding communicator, relationship builder and influencer, capable of working effectively with counterparts of all work levels and across multiple cultures/countries and able to say no.
• Ability to plan, organise and execute successful large events e.g. conferences, trade shows, corporate meetings or large social gatherings.
• Proactive self-starter, accountable for defining, driving and owning the Strategy and Execution

Domain Expertise (Relevant and recent experience within the business group):

• Relevant years’ experience working in beauty and wellbeing marketing or CMI. 
• Marketing Strategy: Growth opportunity identification & segmentation; Category Visioning.
• Trends & Foresight: People insight; Macro trend foresight and prediction; Market & Category insight.
• Capability: Teaching/knowledge embedding; Business acumen.

NOTES

About Unilever

Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of Food, Home and Personal Care products with sales in over 190 countries and reaching 2 billion consumers a day. Unilever has more than 400 brands found in homes around the world, including Dove, Tresemme, Lynx, Lifebuoy, Shea Moisture, Persil, Domestos, Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum, Marmite, The Vegetarian Butcher, Graze and Pot Noodle.

Faced with the challenge of climate change and the need for human development, we want to move towards a world where everyone can live well and within the natural limits of the planet. That’s why our purpose is ‘to make sustainable living commonplace’ 

Location

In June 2020 we announced our plan to consolidate a number of Unilever’s offices across the South East of England into a new Unilever campus in Kingston-upon-Thames in or around early 2025. However, on the 08 August 2024 we announced to our existing staff our proposal to retain our central Head Office in London, 100 Victoria Embankment (“100VE”) until our lease expires in 2027. As a result of this new proposal, we will be consulting with our existing staff, and new joiners who join during this period of consultation at 100VE, on the proposal made in August 2024. During consultation we will clarify the future location of each team and function. This means your role will either be based in 100VE until 2027 or in Kingston-Upon-Thames from early 2025. As we are yet to commence consultation on the proposal you agree, until such a time when consultation has concluded, your normal place of work as set out in the enclosed Statement of Terms & Conditions will be 100VE. You agree that on the conclusion of the consultation your place of work will be 100VE or 100VE until early 2025 and then Kingston-upon-Thames ("the locations") and you will be notified of which of the locations will be your place of work after that consultation ends.

What We Offer

Not only do we offer a competitive salary and pension scheme, we also offer an annual bonus, subsidised gym membership, a discounted staff shop and shares. You’ll have the opportunity to work directly with our renowned and exciting brands in a flexible and hybrid working environment.

Whilst the role is advertised on a full-time basis, we would be happy to discuss possible flexible working options and what this may look like for you. We are a key advocate of wellbeing and offer a variety of support for our people including hubs, programmes and development opportunities. We strive to achieve a family-friendly and inclusive workplace and to, above all, create possibilities for all.

Diversity at Unilever is about inclusion, embracing differences, creating possibilities and growing together for better business performance. We embrace diversity in our workforce. This means giving full and fair consideration to all applicants and continuing development of all employees regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity. We are also more than happy to provide reasonable adjustments during our application and interview process to enable you to be present your best self. To find out more, including about our Employee Resource Groups, please click here Equity, Diversity & Inclusion at Unilever | Unilever.

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