Zandile Mfeka

As a senior category manager with 3 direct reports and cross functional team of 2 marketing managers, 4 brand managers, finance and CD operations i play a bigger role in shaping strategy and executing category and customer plans.

Portfolio: Fabric cleaning & Fabric enhancers categories across Southern Africa

Key responsibilities: I champion category driving activities through translating brand JTBD into category strategies that lead to improved GM and drive brand power.

• Jointly responsible (with National Account Managers) for defining and optimizing our portfolio mix, total trade spend strategy and allocation, annual budgets and investment. Tracking the Total Trade Spend on quarterly basis by activity to ensure optimal spending
• Jointly responsible (with the Brand team) for defining and optimizing marketing strategy (by brand) into an operational plans
• Setting & defining pricing frameworks inline with category strategy.

Collaborating with Shoprite Group to drive category growth within the Unilever

Nutrition portfolio:

• Delivering Shoprite Nutrition turnover target
• With specific profitability targets (as largest UL customer)
• Developed strong analytical skills and experience converting information to promote sales & profit goals within customer business plans.
• Monitoring distribution, pricing, and promotion of Unilever products as well as competitor products and highlighting any opportunities or threats
• Introducing new products to customer and landing distribution, pricing and launch promotions
• Forecasting sales volumes to feed into broader Unilever sales and operational planning process
• Analysing promotions to ensure opportunities to drive market share are maximized while maintaining profitability and using these insights to support current plans
• Demonstrated an ability to anticipate potential problems &
• Developing proactive solutions to avoid the problems
  Managing customer marketing campaigns with Shoprite buyers,
• Ensuring signing off all promotional material to be used in-store &
• Developing the communication plan
• Developed an ability to communicate with presence to assigned Customer & back into the business

Ensuring our brands are easily accessible in Modern &

Traditional trade incl In-home & out of home and creating

memorable shopping experiences

• Preparing the 'Customer Proposition’ when deploying new Innovation products, key customer and channel reviews which included market trends, consumer insights using Dataorbis / Dunhumby / Nielsen category and brand share analysis
• Leading and executing key marketing initiatives and drives to support Unilever brands in trade
• Developing skills and career development opportunities within my immediate team
• Liase with and managed 3rd Party suppliers to facilitate Shopper execution in line with procurement with focus on costs and sustainability
• Developed an ability to communicate effectively, proactively and cross-functionally to ensure thorough understanding of campaign plans, customer needs, and competitive activity within Shopper marketing.

A definite highlight in this role as my first management role with a team of 4 direct reports. The role sharpened my leadership skills and learning how to deliver through people. In the year, we step changed BPC from negative to double digit USG growth.

Portfolio: Hand & Body

Key responsibilities:

• Sales volume forecasting; to manage demand of portfolio, involving specific cross-functional team alignment with Supply Chain, Finance and Marketing to balance the risks of volatile demand to sales turnover and customer service.
• Developing and executing the trade category plan, the channel blueprints and investment plan for each brand across each channel to deliver the category’s growth objectives & brand jobs to be done
• Setting the price & promotional strategy across all the brands within the portfolio by channel
• Collaborating with key Customers to craft joint business plans to deliver category growth.

A highlight of the role was exposure to senior level engagements and P&L ownership. I was promoted within 10months in the role to lead another category.

Portfolio: Fabric solutions

Key responsibilities:

• Lead consolidated CD input into S&OP and own S&OP output, manage and drive CD business performance in the month and quarter.
• Managing holistic customer/ channel investment (shopper marketing, trade marketing, in-store)
• Develop Customer/Channel Marketing Activities, Merchandising Planning, Budgets, Channel/Category Communication
• Represent the CD voice in Brand/ Monthly sales reporting, trends, gaps, opportunities, issues, trade tactics.

This role was a career highlight as i was part of the team that delivered on the defense plan when P&G entered the HDD market. In the same period, i was responsible for landing the Sunlight brands purpose. One of the initiatives im most proud of, was executing the first ever Jojo tank billboard on a major highway in Jhb. This drew incredible media attention for the brand. The Jojo tanks were then donated to drought stricken areas in South Africa.

Portfolio: Sunlight masterbrand

Key responsibilities:

• Developing and deploying insight-driven brand innovation strategy for Sunlight brand to drive short- and long-term growth in the 12-quarter plan.
• Developing and future-proofing Sunlight brand architecture for the South African market
• Lead end-to-end innovation & communication projects focused on locally relevant insights, purpose, mix and communication development.
• Partnering with cross functional team on translating brand JTBD into category driving initiatives and prepare customer trade stories
• Lead cross-functional teams of CD, R&D, Supply Chain, CMI, Finance and Legal to ensure OTIF launches.
• Management of budgets within agreed targets and align with customer activities

This was my first role in UL and within a year i had established myself as the 'go to' CCD assistant. I led 2 bootcamps for peer to peer learning and knowledge transfer and upskilling new recruits in CD.

The most memorable campaigns i worked on, was the launch of Shield black & white and AXE peace variant. As part of Axe launch, we sent a man to space.

Portfolio: Personal care - Deodorants

Key responsibilities:

Cross functional engagement with Marketing, Finance, Supply chain and provide support for key account business and brand building by driving category management principles and provide recommendations based on analytics to deliver mutual growth opportunities.

Owned S&OP and Promo grid tracking

To enhance the image of BankservAfrica through general account management activities, client engagement, product strategy support and marketing with specific internal and external communications mandates.

Portfolio: Group Marketing

Key responsibilities:

• Project management of key deliverables for the CEO and business unit heads.
• Internal & external stakeholder management through writing of press releases, product proposals and other external documents in line with brand values.

To implement a market driven differentiated service that builds sustainable competitiveness within clearly identified channels which delivers sustainable growth in brand equity, sales volume, market share, competitive advantage and corporate reputation.

Portfolio: Jhb East

Key responsibility: To drive the execution of the operational plan in the trade; in the stores where sale conversion happens. My time was dedicated 100% in trade, with a combination of 1800 stores to look after, other key responsibilities included; ensuring the availability & distribution of all innovation in-store, Implementing planograms and

landing brand activations in trade.