Retail and Customer Insights Analyst

About the role

KBL, which produces and distributes a large portfolio of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages across East Africa, is hiring a Retail and Customer Insights Analyst. The role keeps the business externally attentive to the operating environment and to the needs and evolution of customers, retailers and shoppers, and supports data-driven decisions across the business.

Key responsibilities

• Analyze sales and customer data from syndicated sources such as Nielsen, Circana (formerly IRI) and Quantium, as well as retailer-specific loyalty and panel data, to monitor market, category and brand performance and explain business results.
• Help develop category strategies and provide data-driven insights for Joint Business Planning (JBP) with retail customers, including selling stories and presentations for customer meetings.
• Work cross-functionally with Merchandise, Marketing and Sales to communicate complex data simply and clearly, influencing strategy.
• Partner with commercial teams so that business plans reflect customer needs and motivations, revenue growth management and category growth drivers.
• Understand channel dynamics and shopping missions, and recommend corrective actions to capture growth opportunities.
• Lead activity reviews and hold data-informed conversations with sales, marketing, finance and supply to improve performance and forecast accuracy.
• Contribute to shopper planning resource allocation and measurement of share versus competition, category growth, NSV, brand health, distribution, visibility and promotion.
• Work with research agencies and the commercial team to refresh the KBL knowledge and insight vault.

Required profile

• University graduate with a minimum of 3 years of experience.
• Experience in similar roles within Consumer Packaged Goods is ideal.
• Experience managing research agencies is essential.
• Some commercial experience is highly desirable.

Required skills

• All types of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, ideally including shopper/retailer environment research.
• Strong communication skills.
• Ability to challenge existing thinking, work in customer-facing situations and align cross-functional teams.
• Agile and adaptable in a fast-paced, changing environment.