Job Purpose/Overview 

 We are seeking a dynamic and visionary Vice President of Human Insights to lead our North America’s efforts to deeply understand consumer needs, behaviors, and trends. This executive will be responsible for driving deep consumer understanding across all categories and channels cross-functionally, shaping brand strategy, innovation, product development, and go-to-market decisions through actionable insights.

This role will be a key member of the Marketing Leadership Team and the North American Senior Leaders, helping to shape the future of the confectionary category with a strong voice grounded in data-driven storytelling, behavioral insights, category knowledge and emerging trends. The role ensures that we continue to aggressively build human centricity through our understanding and knowledge of people (consumer, shopper, and general human context), future trends, the category and its adjacencies, and the competition across the region to ensure we have competitive advantage in the marketplace by driving insights and foresight into action.

Key Responsibilities 

 Through self and team, 

• Lead Consumer Understanding: Build and lead a high-performing insights team to deliver actionable, forward-looking consumer, shopper, and category insights. Leverage key insights and data to represent an objective point of view and enable effective and efficient decision making in relevant forums related to key business processes. 
• Shape Strategy: Partner with Marketing, Innovation, R&D, and Sales to guide brand strategy, white space identification, product innovation, and category expansion efforts. 
• Insights Roadmap: Develop and execute a multi-year insights strategy aligned with corporate goals, using a mix of qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, and syndicated data sources. 
• Trend Scouting & Foresight: Track food, health & wellness, cultural, and consumer behavior trends; translate emerging macro shifts into business opportunities. 
• Data-Driven Culture: Evangelize the value of consumer empathy and data across the organization, fostering a culture where insights fuel decisions. 
• Lead Advanced Analytics and Data Science: Oversee the development and deployment of advanced analytics capabilities in collaboration with the Data Technologies teams, including predictive modeling, machine learning solutions, and business intelligence dashboards, to extract actionable insights and drive data-driven decision-making. Influence stakeholders and promoting a data-driven culture throughout the organization. 
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Serve as a strategic thought partner to senior leaders, providing regular briefings and POVs that connect consumer behavior to business impact. Partner with One Demand Regional LT on selected prioritized workstreams, connecting dots across growth levers (brand & content, innovation, portfolio strategy, and Price Pack Architecture) to unlock growth 
• Innovation Support: Inform the innovation funnel from ideation through launch, including concept testing, product fit, pricing, and positioning. 
• ROI & Brand Tracking: Oversee brand health tracking, campaign measurement, business tracking including category and competitive performance, ensuring alignment with KPIs. Partner on new methodologies and tools including AI and machine learning to impact decision-making. 
• Research Operations: Oversee research budget, vendor partnerships, and ensure efficient, compliant, and high-quality execution of all studies. Own the relationships with key external agencies at a regional level 
• Build Effective Teams: Lead a team of Insights professionals, manage and develop talent and drive engagement across the regionally based Insights associates (both direct and dotted line) 
• Enterprise Leadership: Set and align the regional insights agenda, determine priorities aligned with business priorities, support the One Demand mindset and behaviors, set the research agenda and budget. Influence and align the global insights agenda to meet regional needs. Active member of the Global Human Intelligence Council, shaping vision, strategy and talent agenda for Insights 

Job Specifications/Qualifications 

• Minimum 15+ years of progressive experience in consumer insights, market research, or strategic planning, preferably in the food & beverage, CPG, or retail sector. 
• Minimum 5+ years of proven leadership experience managing high-performing insights teams. 
• Experience building and scaling multi-level Insights teams including organizational design, resource management/approvals, recruiting, and talent management. 
• Acute ability to manage multiple stakeholders and priorities with efficient resources. 
• Strong understanding of both traditional and modern research methodologies (e.g., ethnography, segmentation, AI-driven analytics, social listening). Experience leading analytics and digitalization of processes preferred. 
• Demonstrated success translating consumer data into business growth strategies. 
• Executive presence with outstanding communication, influence, and storytelling skills. 
• Experience supporting product innovation and brand development. 
• Bachelor’s degree required; advanced degree in marketing, psychology, data science, or related field preferred. 

Key Functional Competencies & Technical Skills (3-5) 

Identify & Influence Strategies: Identify, understand and translate trends in strategic framework driving category and our growth 

Manages and Deploys Knowledge: The ability to build knowledge, best practice, and key beliefs and actively leverage across projects, teams, and regions to drive both efficiency and experimentation across the business. 

Generate & Deploy Insights with Impact: Ability to distill insights and translate them into strong storytelling and communication skills verbal and written 

Technology & Methodology Acumen: Understand latest technology and methodology trends and their potential for consumer insights 

Highly data literate, proven ability to generate insights from a wide variety of data sources (syndicated data, ad hoc research, 3rd party sources, 1st party data) to create globally scalable insights