消费品行业(Consumer Products)下篇

5已有 909 次阅读  2010-08-04 01:11   标签Consumer  下篇  消费品  Products  行业 

Job descriptions and tips

Key Jobs

Most of the jobs described below require an undergraduate degree or an MBA. Senior management positions in marketing, operations, R&D, and other departments tend to be filled from within the company (or at least, from within the industry). This is a hierarchical business and though merit and hard work count for a lot, even the wunderkinds have to do time before they're promoted.

Customer Service
This is as entry level as you can get at any major consumer products company; customer service representatives are on the front lines with the consumer all day, everyday. Tasks can include everything from registering complaints to hearing praise, entering orders to solving a crisis with a distributor or shipping company. Many CS folks use this position as a launch pad for a career in marketing—arguably, there are few better ways to really get to know the product and the customer. To thrive in this job, you have to be a people person with a lot of energy. Salary range: $20,000 to $40,000.

Marketing Assistant or Analyst
If you've just graduated from college, these are the trenches that prepare you for product management and brand management. Some of the work here is administrative, but your ideas are welcome and the brand management team will depend on your organizational ability as much as your knowledge of the target customer. An MBA will typically start as an assistant brand manager for a few years before taking charge of shepherding all the product pieces to market. In either case, you can expect a lot of poring over sales and merchandising figures, Nielsen ratings, and premiums. Compensation varies widely depending on the company and its location, as well as where you went to school and your relevant experience. Salary range: $25,000 to $70,000.

Product or Brand Manager
Conjure up your gloomiest images of what shopping was like in the Soviet Union. This is the fate product managers work to save us from. They create the catchy new names and novel packaging. They ask prospective customers how to make products even more irresistible. Then they scramble like mad for prominent display space, ad dollars, and their marketing director's active support. You either work your way up the ladder to these jobs or start at this rung with an MBA. Very important factoid: Headhunters really love successful product managers. Salary range: $70,000 to $120,000.

Market Researcher
To do this job, you don't really have to wear glasses and ask silly questions—you do have to have a strong interest in the psychology of customer behavior and an ability to coax this information out of prospective purchasers. Tools of the trade include focus groups, one-on-one interviews, Nielsen data, and quantitative surveys. People can enter these positions from undergraduate, MBA, or industry backgrounds. Salary range: $30,000 to $100,000.

Research Scientist
Academic appointments for chemists and biologists are hard to come by these days and often don't pay enough to support a family. Formulating and developing new products—whether shampoo or frozen dinners—is a compromise many scientists find less difficult and more interesting than they had imagined. You don't need a head for numbers, but you do need a better sense of consumers and markets than most lab technicians have. "Just because you think purple cereal with pink speckles would be really fun to develop doesn't mean people will buy it," says one scientist. Salary range: $45,000 to $100,000.

Sales
You still see them from time to time, personable young people trundling from small retailer to small retailer promoting their wares. Sales is generally the easiest place to enter a company without experience. Those who become successful at this work are usually stronger on personality and gumption than on higher education. Generally, the bigger the accounts you work on, the more money you can make. At the senior level, the earning potential far surpasses that of a brand manager—and you won't have the MBA debt to worry about either. Salary range: $25,000 to $100,000.

Logistics or Manufacturing Engineer
And now for something completely different. Logistics engineers are the folks who figure out the popular but complex just-in-time manufacturing—the approach to scheduling which allows retailers to receive factory orders when they need them, not weeks or months in advance. If you have strong organizational and computer skills—plus patience and diplomacy—you'd be good at this work. But no matter how carefully you think you've calibrated just-in-time, every now and again human fallibility will intrude, and according to one insider, "just-in-time becomes just-in-time-to-catch-hell-and-worse." Salary range: $60,000 to $100,000.

Finance Manager
CPG companies need MBAs with creative financing skills to help solve problems, assess profitability, and acquire new businesses. In some companies, these finance analysts and managers actually have equal and occasionally even greater authority than marketers. They aren't responsible for developing marketing plans or working with the advertising agency, but they make many of the important recommendations and decisions that direct the course of business strategy and new product development. Salary range: $60,000 to $120,000.

Getting Hired

The recruiting process in consumer products varies by company, job function, and career stage. Smaller CPG companies—for example, the mom-and-pop pickle company whose products are only available regionally—don’t really do much in terms of recruiting, other than placing help-wanted ads when they need new bodies, or maybe employing an executive search firm if they need high-level help. It’s the bigger consumer products companies that employ the bulk of the people in this industry.

Most big consumer products companies recruit on campus for new hires. Almost invariably, they’re looking for marketing/brand management candidates. In many cases, they’re also looking for candidates to fill other corporate functions such as finance, sales, research & development, IT, or operations. This means that big companies can have a presence on a variety of campuses, and an interest in a variety of students. For instance, CPG companies often turn to campus recruiting to fill out their corps of sales people. Companies looking for operations folks may recruit at business schools or engineering schools. And companies that want to make R&D hires may recruit students from PhD programs in science fields like chemistry or biology. The way to know for sure how the companies you’re interested in do their student recruiting is to check out their websites and contact their recruiters, and check with your campus career center.

Almost all big consumer products companies offer internships for MBA students looking to get into brand management careers, and often they have internships for other MBA types. Many companies also offer internships for undergrads. These are a fantastic way to learn more about the career you’re interested in, to learn more about what it’s like to work at a specific company you’re targeting, and to give yourself a major advantage over the competition when it comes time to interview for a full-time position at the company where you interned.

The competition to land a spot at a top company is intense. The biggest players are well known, they offer great training programs, and they hire a relatively small number of talented candidates. If you're set on landing a job at a consumer products company, keep these things in mind:

  • Because turnover in the industry is low, growth is stable, and most firms hire a relatively small number of candidates each year, the competition for positions is very strong. To get a job, you'll need to have a solid educational background, good people skills, and evidence of your leadership capabilities.

  • No one in consumer products is interested in hearing why you might deign to work for them for a brief period while en route to something far more glamorous and well paid. Many of the top people in the industry have been with the same company since graduating.

  • Be prepared to demonstrate your interest in the consumer products world. For marketing positions, you'll likely be asked to explain a favorite product promotion strategy; even for other positions, you'll probably be expected to know what products the company produces, who the competition is, and why it's not as good.
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