Consumer Insights Manager – Consumer Electronics

Midea America Corp. is one of the world’s largest home appliance brands, offering the most comprehensive selection of products in the world to fully serve the needs of day-to-day living at home, at work, or anywhere else you go. In North America we strive to aim high, put the customer first, transform and innovate the marketplace, utilizing our commitment, dedication, inclusion and partnership with our teams. We are a global company with over 150,000 employees and operations in more than 195 countries. As a publicly listed company, we are also ranked #245 as a Fortune Global 500 company and offers one of the most comprehensive ranges in the home appliance industry. Midea America is a subsidiary of Midea with over 200 employees in the US and we are expanding our presence in North America.

Job Summary

The Consumer & Market Insights team serves as consumer champion and voice of local consumer. The team is responsible to lead and manage all consumer learning plans and insights projects whilst building strong partnership at various facets of the business.

In the expansion of our business in the US, the need of installing a senior Consumer & Market Insights function in the region has become heightened. We are looking for an experienced insights professional to build the US insights learning plan. This role is key to help transform the mindset in the organization, and to steer and support our product offering in the country with compelling consumer-driven value proposition based on rich and refreshing knowledge and insights.

The ideal candidate is a self-driven professional who needs no instruction how and where to start. He/she is an outstanding individual contributor with strong sense of ownership and initiatives. With a high business acumen, his/her research expertise and skills are strong backbone of the business partnership with key stakeholders including, but not limited to the local product and marketing teams, local research and development teams, global research team, and product divisions based in China. This is the position for someone with superb organizational awareness and communication skills, sound research know-how and hands-on attitude. It is for an insight practitioner who is not fearful of ambiguity and stress, not afraid of challenging status quo and possesses outstanding influence skills.

With our consumer at heart, reporting directly to Head of Brand Marketing in the US your key focus will be consumer market insight knowledge & insights development in the US.

Essential Job Responsibilities

• Build and own US regional knowledge & insight center that packs valuable information to input business operation, guide and inspire business. This includes, but not limited to market intelligence, retail intelligence, competitor monitoring, trends movements, as well as fundamental understanding of US culture and the relevant consumer space.
• Support strategic innovation programs.
• Lead consumer research programs from insight mining and identification to the creation and development of value proposition via working closely with multiple stakeholders including product innovation teams, product managers, and product planning teams from China.
• Independently devise and lead appropriate research programs to collaborate with multiple functions in the organization, with or without help from a third-party agency. Such research programs could include but not limited to usage & attitudes, ethnography, innovation incubator/design thinking.
• Product testing, brand research, cultural study, Marketing messaging and communication, as well as ongoing management of proprietary research panels.
• Leverage on past and existing information to derive highly relevant learning and deploy it to the organization for concrete implementation. E.g. Segmentation, Brand Tracker, Price Analysis, Nielsen, GfK, Ipsos, past research, etc.
• Explore new and relevant data sources to assist the business in understanding the culture, the market and the categories well.
• Regular delivery of such knowledge & insights to enable and mobilize the team to embrace changed way of thinking and working.

Research implementation and insights generation:

• Work on an exciting product portfolio covering a variety of home appliance and air conditioner categories. Partner with BU Product Managers, Global Product Division, R&D team, Regional BU Sales and Marketing by organizing and leading all research and insights projects and inputting into value proposition development for US product lines.
• Help the business team with the initiation and scoping of research projects, identify knowledge gap, design the approach, and partner with external research providers to deliver actionable insights into OBM end to end process. Consult on validation testing of vendor research processes and outputs. Such research could include but not limited to usage & attitudes, ethnography, innovation incubator/design thinking, product testing, brand research, cultural study, segmentation, Marketing messaging and communication.
• Synergize all research initiatives that take place in other regions. To become the trustworthy local research authority in overseeing and influencing all projects and gatekeeping quality of research design and execution in the US.
• Support Global Head of Consumer & Market Insights in developing and implementing the global and regional CMI framework.

Coaching and training:

• Act as the cultural ambassador representing the voice of US consumers and encourage the organization to understand them and get close to them.
• Provide training and coaching through formal and informal activities with the key stakeholders such as Product Managers and Marketing.

Other:

• Propose annual research strategy to Leadership and manage the execution thereof.
• Manage the MACC CMI annual research budget.
• Activities include, but are not limited to, managing the vendor briefing process, scoping and creating project applications, facilitating pitch process and selection of vendors, submitting contracts for approval and signing, providing support for invoice payment and billing reconciliation processes

Required Qualifications:

• 5-7 years of working experience in market research and consumer insight, having worked in such a function at a client-side organization before, or ideally combined experience of both client-side and agency side.
• Solid knowledge and experience in both quantitative and qualitative research.
• Good familiarity with a range of research methodology from upstream to downstream of innovation development process.
• Worked in a country level capacity before. Experienced or interested in home appliance products.
• Excellent communication skills and strong stakeholder management skills. Ability to quickly find strong foothold and thrive in an environment where co-workers are not typically research savvy.
• Proactive and patient with an agile mindset. Comfortable in a start-up setting and possesses entrepreneurial spirit.
• Pleasant personality, humble and down to earth with strong drive to succeed.
• Fluent in English. Mandarin would be a plus

Salary Manager: 100K – 140K

Midea is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Midea America Corp