Marketing Jobs

What Does a Product Manager in Consumer Packaged Goods Do?

To put it simply, you are like a mini-CEO without direct power

“Hey, what do you do as a product manager?”

A friend contacted me recently to prepare for an interview for a product marketing role in contact lenses.

She had a lot of questions for me, and understandably so.

There’s a lot of information online for product managers. Or product marketing managers.

In tech.

That’s much less the case for consumer packaged goods (CPG), sometimes also referred to as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). Ironic, given that the CPG business has been around longer than technology businesses.

That might be because CPG marketers do not have as much visibility as compared to tech product marketers, given the spirit of the times, but that is a story for another day.

Inspired by this, I have decided to write a short post to answer what I know about being a product manager in consumer packaged goods.

A bit about my credentials — I have worked at two different beauty companies for close to ten years. Whatever I write about in this article comes partly from my experience.

It is also based on my conversations with people who work in similar roles in other industries. Although the details and actual work may differ depending on the industry and the company, overall, the entire process is not usually very different.

Marketing in the tech industry is a different beast, however, so I won’t be talking about that. I’m not qualified. But if you’re interested to know the difference, there is a great article on Forbes you can read here — The 4 Types Of Marketing Roles In Tech.

Job #1 Own the strategy and drive the business

What sets the marketing function in consumer packaged goods apart from other roles is that you are the “owner” of your business.

You are responsible for the entire business — the brand P&L and the strategy. You need to manage both the top line and the bottom line — especially for the expenses related to new product development and asset creation, and promotional campaigns.

Kimberly A. Whitler, in Survey Reveals The Companies That Develop The Best C-Level Marketing Leaders, writes that the top CPG companies put marketers in the strategic seat.

The top 15 firms, in contrast, generally value marketers and train them to be enterprise-wide, P&L leaders who are accountable for total business results — not responsible for just a cost center.

You lead from product conception to product launch.

In the tech industry, marketing is more focused on the downstream side of things — specifically in the promotion and go-to-market strategy, since in most cases, engineers are the ones to lead product development.

In CPG, products tend towards homogeneity and there is a lot more competition. Consequently, there is a lot more pressure to differentiate your product. As a result, most new product development is usually based on consumer insight and thus is led by marketing.

Job #2 Create the strategic product roadmap and product concepts, and set the price

So you’ll be responsible for driving the business. How?

You’ll have to analyze the business.

What are the macro trends? What is the competitive marketplace like? Who are the competitors? Who are the consumers? Who are the business partners you work with? Your first job is to understand all of that.

Then, you’ll need to define a winning strategy. Much of it will be trial and error, especially when it comes to doing innovative things. Study, plan, execute, review, and execute again.

Your key role is to define where and how you compete. What are the products you create to win? What are the concepts? What is the strategic roadmap? Do you launch a new product or promote an existing one?

You’ll also be involved in pricing decisions. There is a lot of stuff written on pricing psychology, which is beyond the scope of this article.

Luckily, you don’t need to do it alone. You will often be working with a consumer insights team. They are your go-to experts to analyze key market trends and carry out necessary consumer research. Both quantitative and qualitative.

Job #3 Work with the teams that create the products

In CPG/FMCG, marketers manage the entire process from product concept to market launch. After you’ve created the product concept, you need to actually create it.

Who creates the products? Well, a couple of teams.

You have the packaging designers. These are the experts in packaging design, both from a functional, but also aesthetic standpoint. In most CPG companies, the packaging is tested extensively with consumers before they are launched.

This doesn’t mean that this is foolproof, as the many marketing fails in the history of product launches in the beverage industry demonstrate.

Another business partner is the procurement team. Procurement is an essential function as they help you negotiate the lowest prices on your inputs.

You’ll also work with R&D. The technologists or engineers who make the products.

Ideally, you should have a dedicated project manager who will help you manage the entire schedule, get rid of obstacles and blocks, and make sure your product is launched on time.

Job #4 Develop creative assets and the 360-degree campaign

Product marketers are expected to lead campaign development. If you have the budget, you will also have help from an advertising agency. The agency will help you organize the entire project and assign the creative team.

In case you’re wondering, no, you won’t be directing the creative assets (e.g. product photography, brand films, images, PR materials, copy). But you do need to set the objectives, the core messaging, who the target audience is, and what kind of action you want to influence your audience to take.

You also need to set the brand tone of voice as well. Provide creative references if possible. This is to make sure that the creative team does not give you something you totally didn’t expect.

Of course, creative assets must reach the audience through activations or campaigns. Prior to the digital age, these were largely through traditional media like television, magazines, newspapers, brochures, and pamphlets.

Nowadays, paid advertising on digital channels, social media, paid influencers, and other methods are part of the entire communication mix.

You don’t need to be an expert at all of them. It’s quite difficult to be.

You do need to understand each promotional channel sufficiently so that you can communicate effectively with the experts in each area. Promotional channels will evolve with technology and social trends. So, you need to keep up.

Job #5 Lead cross-functionally and get buy-in to execute and get to market

I forgot to mention this, but the name of your position will vary depending on the industry or company. Here are some of them:

• Marketing manager
• Product manager
• Product marketing manager
• Brand manager

Whatever the name of the role is, you’ll be working cross-functionally most of the time, leading different teams to create the end product for the consumer. In practice, this has a major implication:

You will not be the expert.

Your expertise is in understanding the consumer and the marketplace. Grasping consumer insights, market trends, and what competitors are doing.

Then, you translate it into a language that different teams in your company can understand. The goal is to deliver a product that gives some sort of value to the consumer.

DC Palter, writing about marketing from the point of view of a startup founder, defines marketing as “the translation layer between the external — the customer — and the internal — product development.”

Although tech companies and CPG/FMCG companies give different weights to the role of marketing, I believe the insight here is essentially the same.

You are the two-way bridge between the consumer and the company.

Your job is to bring all these disparate teams together:

• Consumer insight teams.
• Designers.
• Creative teams.
• Procurement teams.
• Technologists and engineers.
• Digital marketing experts.
• Sales teams

The list goes on…

Based on your expert understanding of the consumer, you guide them to create something of value for the consumer. To use a creative analogy, you are the producer of a film. You are not the actor, not the scriptwriter, and certainly not the cameraman.

To succeed in the role, you need to be a skilled listener and an expert communicator.

There will be conflicts. You’ll need to define, and then re-define the objectives to make sure everyone stays on track. But you shouldn’t also tell them what to do. The experts are experts for a reason.

Stand back and let them do their jobs once you’ve given them direction. And if it goes off tangent, gently re-orient them and explain the expected changes — always logically, highlighting the business objectives.

Having the ability to imagine and communicate is so important to this role. The skill to create a vision, define the roadmap, visualize the product concepts, and lead different teams to create the expected output is crucial and cannot be understated.

Job #6 And then, measure and repeat

Measurement is one of the keys to success. All modern marketing principles insist on measurement. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed.

Even abstract concepts like “brand equity” or “brand awareness” can be measured by defining what you mean by those things. The goal is to operationalize those concepts so that you can track abstract “cultural” things.

For example, is one of your brand values to offer a memorable experience? Is it to make people feel happy?

Then you might want to track the attribute “makes me feel happy” through a questionnaire of randomly sampled consumers. You define the attributes that are important for your brand so that you can quantify and track brand equity in an unbiased and consistent way.

In my first marketing job, we hardly did any measurement. It was not entirely our fault, since we hardly had any budget.

But without any measurement, words like brand equity become like cotton candy. Pleasant to taste, but ultimately fluffy and full of empty calories.

And it is very easy for your stakeholders to roll their eyes at you when you throw about words like brand equity without operationalizing it.

Don’t be a cotton candy marketer. Measure, measure, and measure some more.

Don’t believe the people who tell you brand equity cannot be measured. That’s not true at all.

Summary: You are a mini-CEO without direct power

Ultimately, the job of a product manager is tough. You need to wear multiple hats. You have no direct power over the many stakeholders you need to work with.

You’ll need to lead, inspire, cajole, convince, negotiate, manage, and communicate.

Everyday.

You’ll need to get into the trenches and get your hands dirty. A product manager cannot say “that is not my job” — by definition, your job is the business.

In essence, you are a mini-CEO without any direct power. That is why succeeding in the role requires very high-level communication, analytical skill, multitasking, prioritization, and management skills.

A while ago, I heard someone say, with an attitude of dismissal, that “anyone can do marketing.”

In a sense, this is true. Marketing is not rocket science. It is not a specialized skill like dentistry or neurosurgery. You do not need years and years of training. It’s also not like coding where you need to spend years studying programming languages.

But just because marketing is simple, does not mean that it is easy. It also doesn’t mean that you will “get” marketing in a few months on the job.

Even if you are a genius, society changes, consumer preferences change, and technologies change. So too must your job.

It will stretch you to your intellectual, organizational, managerial, and communicative limits.

And, ultimately, I think that people who succeed in the role must possess curiosity, resilience, empathy, intellect, flexibility, and agility — all in equal measure.

© Alvin T. 2022

Enjoyed this marketing story? Here’s another marketing essay by the same author: Thinking like a Marketer Will Change the Way You See People

The author is an editor of Japonica and also writes on a wide variety of topics. His key topics are society, culture, modern work, and cryptocurrency, with the occasional fictional story, creative piece, or reflective essay. Discover his most-read stories here.

If these topics interest you, consider subscribing to receive new stories from the author via e-mail.