Senior Director, Integrated Ops - Regional Frontline Marketing (Independent Bottlers)

Role Context & Business Scope

This is a senior system leadership role with material volume, revenue, and share impact, responsible for driving category-led growth and execution excellence across Independent Bottlers.

The role acts as the regional marketing custodian for the bottler system, ensuring central category and brand strategies are translated into fit-for-market portfolio choices, activation plans, and innovation priorities, and executed with rigor through strong governance, capability building, and system alignment.

Success in this role is defined by the ability to convert strategy into consistent marketplace impact, delivering volume growth, share gain, and sustainable category development, while strengthening bottler marketing and execution capability at scale.

Overarching Business Metrics & Outcomes

The role is directly accountable for delivering:

• Volume growth in line with Business Plan commitments

• Positive share gain across priority categories and channels

• Bottler execution capability ownership, with a strong focus on quality, consistency, and scalability of marketplace execution

• Strong FLM and Bottler Marketing Execution Community, anchored in best practices and disciplined ways of working

• Shopper & Commercial execution excellence, including in-store activation, RED POS alignment, and shopper messaging effectiveness

• End-to-end integration of Marketing Calendars (ownership) with Commercial Calendars (tight integration and governance)

• Leadership of agile, cross-system projects (~20% time), including innovation pilots, commercialisation, big bets, and long-term bottler capability agendas

• Build deep understanding of category dynamics, consumer needs, shopper behaviour, and channel economics across assigned regions

• Track competitive activity, white spaces, and emerging occasions using internal and external data (BEACH, HHP, Media, FMCG benchmarks)

• Establish clarity on portfolio roles, category growth drivers, and execution barriers

• Translate insights into clear, actionable category hypotheses that shape planning, innovation, and activation choices

• Regular, high-quality category and market performance reviews (volume, share, mix, penetration, execution health)

• At least one material, category-led insight per quarter influencing plans or execution

• Own and drive the Regional IQ Marketing Calendar with a category-first lens-creation, alignment, execution, tracking, and post-review discipline

• Translate central category and IMX strategies into sharply prioritised local activation plans across channels, formats, and price tiers

• Drive strong localisation and amplification of IMX campaigns, in close partnership with central teams and bottlers

• Lead portfolio and activity prioritisation to maximise impact and minimise fragmentation or wasted spend

• Establish robust execution governance, including post-activity reviews and continuous improvement loops

• On-time, high-quality execution of aligned category programs

• Clear reduction in execution gaps, overlaps, and portfolio conflicts

• Strong feedback from Category, IMX, Franchise, and Bottler stakeholders

• Serve as the primary regional marketing interface for Independent Bottlers across category, operations, and system partners

• Influence category strategy inputs, innovation choices, and activation priorities by bringing strong local context and growth opportunities

• Lead category pilots, innovation tests, and learning agendas with central teams and bottlers

• Feed forward market insights into LRP, ABP, and Business Planning cycles

• Build confidence in OU marketing through clarity, responsiveness, and strong category leadership

• High alignment between IQ calendars and category priorities

• Quality and impact of regional inputs into planning cycles

• Timely resolution of category and execution-related issues

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Front-Line Marketers, with strong emphasis on category thinking, planning rigor, and execution excellence

• Build and scale bottler marketing capability, embedding consistent ways of working and best practices

• Enable seamless collaboration between regional FLMs and central Category / IMX teams

• Remove barriers, simplify processes, and drive system-wide consistency

• Role-model strong leadership, engagement, and culture across the FLM community

• Measurable uplift in category fluency and planning quality

• Strong engagement and capability indicators across teams

• Consistent delivery against both central and regional priorities

• 12-15 years of progressive experience in marketing, category leadership, or integrated commercial roles

• Strong background in front-line marketing execution, portfolio strategy, and category management

• Proven ability to influence without authority across central teams, regions, and Independent Bottlers

• Strong commercial and business acumen

• Experience working across diverse markets and partner ecosystems preferred

• Deep category and portfolio thinking, with the ability to translate strategy into marketplace execution

• Strong stakeholder management across Category, IMX, Operations, Shopper, and Bottlers

• High execution rigour with disciplined planning, governance, and review mechanisms

• Ability to balance central strategy with local market realities

• Credibility to represent and lead the regional marketing and category agenda at scale