What do you do? As the global vertical marketing manager, I head up the worldwide marketing strategy for food and other consumer goods segments at Videojet Technologies. Videojet provides in-line printing, coding and marking products to help manufacturers comply with food ingredient labelling regulations. We also offer track and trace technologies to support customers in product traceability, to boost consumer safety and eliminate the threat of product counterfeiting.
Tell us about your current role My main responsibility is to understand how our customers use our coding technologies and how we can best address global trends moving forward. This entails a lot of research and in-depth talks with customers to find out more about their needs. I then use those insights to create campaigns that educate customers about what Videojet has to offer in the global food sectors, as well as training materials to support our international sales teams. I feed my knowledge of customer requirements to the product development teams to ensure our systems continue to offer functionality that meet industry needs.
How did you get into the industry? I started working for Videojet after getting my Master of Business Administration (MBA) diploma. I wanted to work in the industrial sector after graduate school – I enjoy getting an in-depth understanding of manufacturing processes, seeing how complex machinery is developed and the impact it can have on customers’ production processes.
What do you like most about your job? A core part of my job is hearing the voice of the customer, which means collecting insights from customers as we do our development work. You can learn more in 30 minutes from simply talking to your customers than you can in a month-long consulting engagement. I spend a lot of time traveling globally to visit manufacturers in all our major markets. This way I get to see first-hand what their production line needs are and what they want from their coding technology.
What’s the hardest thing about your job? The hardest part is distilling all the information and feedback from customers into an effective, impactful marketing strategy. Any strategy I come up with has to work on a global level, but also be relevant in each individual region. It needs to be something that encourages manufacturers to enquire after a particular technology. It can be challenging to achieve this, but it’s rewarding too.
Is there such a thing as a typical day for you? It’s a mix of visiting customers and creating the marketing materials that we want to use to promote our products to manufacturers. This involves researching the latest market trends around the world, as well as changes in labelling regulations and legislation relating to product safety. I also have to work with our product development and strategy teams on the future of our technologies and Videojet as a whole, so I attend lots of brainstorms and meetings as well.
What advice would you give people interested in a job in your field? You need to have an inquisitive mind. You need to constantly ask yourself questions like “How does this process work? Why does it work that way? How can it be improved?”. It’s an adventure, so if you are the kind of person who likes learning how industrial processes work and are willing to ask lots of questions to understand a manufacturing line from every angle, this is the job for you.
What do you see as the next top trend in five years’ time? We’re living in an era of product proliferation – where the same manufacturers are producing a broader range of products to address the specific needs of a certain segment of customers. At Videojet, we’re being asked to develop coding and labelling technology that offers improved flexibility to support fast, efficient changeovers to maintain high productivity for manufacturers.
I see regulations relating to ingredient information and traceability becoming more rigorous worldwide over the next few years. In emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs), people are climbing the socio-economic ladder, meaning they are eating more processed food products. Entering new markets will have implications for manufacturers in terms of product packaging – we’ll need to ensure we have the coding technologies in place that can print on new substrates as and when they are introduced.