Jordan Smith

Consumer and Market Insights professional, with experience both vendor and client side.

Global Consumer Insights Manager at General Mills, September 2020 to present

Consumer Insights & Strategy lead for Nature Valley and Fibre One for all markets outside of the US & Canada (NET $220M business) between September 2020 and July 2024.

Promoted in August 2024 into a more senior role on Old El Paso and Green Giant, again all markets outside of US & Canada (NET $1bn).

Consumer:

• Segmentations; leverage sales, consumption & media data to identify, size & profile consumer, shopper & media targets 
• Launched demand spaces; needs-scoping, identifying brand anchor points & key growth opportunities
• Usage & attitude studies to identify drivers & barriers for our categories, our adjacencies and our brands.
• Led trend of trends reviews to identify emerging, dominant and recessive codes 
• Designed & launched the global roll-out of the consumer empathy programme across all General Mills categories/brands

Category & Shopper

• Partnered with Category Management teams on a number of workstreams; category growth strategy, category entry points, shopper journey maps & purchase decision hierarchies, retailer trade sells
• Led all local consumer insight for the UK and France, supporting any request for retailer data points 
• Partnered with Data Analytics to regularly review category, brand & product performance in market. Also rolled out EUAU sales data harmonisation on Snacks to bring clarity to global decision making
• 5Cs; an audit of all existing information (sales, consumption & media data, trends etc) to provide a holistic review of all things Culture/Context, Consumer, Category, Competition & Commerce/Channel
• Strategic review of channel & aisle placements, pricing & pack formats to optimise business scale & retailer dynamics

Growth Strategy 

• CI Lead for Growth X team; leading expansion of existing Snacks & Meals brands into new categories & markets.
• Led all insight into the ongoing market accelerations & geo-expansions into France, Germany and the Netherlands  
• Ran insight-to-action workshops on a number of key areas; habit loops & how to use them, how to create value
• Connecting data dots to identify over £100m worth of growth opportunities for General Mills in Snacking
• Designed & ran growth workshops for existing core products; yielding our best & biggest growth plan makers. 
  • PPA outcomes included singles & family/value packs to unlock new aisles, channels & markets
  • Inno outcomes included new sub-platforms, line extensions, nutritional improvements / regulatory compliance (HFSS for UK, Nutriscore for EU, Health Star Ratings for ANZ), margin improvements.

Product Development: 

• Portfolio strategy; closing gaps between reality vs intent, inform range rationalisation & identify key gaps for innovation
• Innovation pipeline; building a three year plan that lines up to longer term growth visions
• Stakeholder immersions into demand spaces, functional/emotional needs and jobs to be done
• Competitor reviews into pain points/ joys and design principles (hygiene factors vs points of differentiation/superiority) 
• Stakeholder alignments on key questions, hypotheses & levels of confidence – foundations to build learning plans
• Iterative test & learn design sprinting, leveraging a range of different qualitative & quantitative approaches, throughout opportunity identification and the build phase:
  • Identify consumer benefit & how to communicate (naming, claims testing, pack design optimisation etc.), 
  • Product development (ingredients, flavours, nutrition, sensory, usability, job performance etc.)
• Experimentation of new vendors, tools and methods; including a number of different AI experiments 
• Post launch learning & in market optimisation, leveraging sales data, consumption data, social listening, consumer complaints, store walks, consumer 
• BIG wins: 
  • Bringing HFSS compliance to Nature Valley Crunchy, Nature Valley Protein, Fibre One Brownie
  • Recruited new buyers with Fibre One Doughnuts; a Nielsen Superstar & Grocers New Product Award nominee 
  • Nature Valley Family Packs; our most successful & incremental launch since Nature Valley Protein in 2016

Brand Development:

• Led insight into Nature Valley, Fibre One and Old El Paso brand positionings; leading to new brand campaigns & new packaging architectures - including semiotics/category landscaping and distinctive brand assets 
• Outstanding System 1 results into Nature Valley ‘Get Equipped For Life’ campaigns; achieving 5/5 with our target
• Pack architectures balancing desirability, stopability/stand out (brand block) & shopability of range.
• Brand vs product communications hierarchies, including front of pack claims to drive purchasing 
• Brand Relevance Tracking and Marketing Mix Modelling across key markets

Other Achievements:

• Represented the cross functional consumer learning team on the Snacks Leadership Team; ensuring appropriate resource investment to growth potential
  • Managed resource prioritisation for two Data Analysts in India and one Sensory Design Researcher in Spain
• Standardised & internalised workstreams; usage & attitude studies into adjacencies, concept testing, brand tracking
• Led France Acceleration workstream, resulting in double-digit growth
• Presented one of our behavioural experiments at the Quirks even in Chicago 
• Have been nominated every year for the Global CMI award for Most Valued Player, winning it last year
• Founded the LGBTQIA+ society for the UK office and led its geo-expansion across EUAU

Kubi Kalloo, Account Director of Insight and Planning (March 2018 – August 2020)

Here I worked on Global Insight, Strategy & Planning projects with very senior stakeholders for the likes of General Mills, Estée Lauder Companies (La Mer, MAC, etc.), Unilever, Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, IKEA, the Environment Agency and Visit Britain.

2CV Research, International Research Manager (Feb 2017 – March 2018)

Learned how to blend behaviour science & human centred design thinking with traditional research for companies including Tesco, NBC Universal, 118 118, EA, Jagex, PHE, Square Enix & Vodafone across Europe, Africa & Asia.

River Research, Research Executive, Senior Research Executive and then Research Manager (June 2015 – Feb 2017)

Worked directly with the CEO at this boutique agency on multi-market qualitative research projects. Clients included the likes of Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, Doro, Very, IKEA, ghd, Penguin Random House, King, Hive British Gas

The Leading Edge, Graduate to Research Executive (October 2013 – June 2015)

Global insight & strategy consultancy, learning both Qualitative and Quantitative research, working on the likes of McDonald’s, Cancer Research UK, Premier Foods, AB In-Bev, Nestle, Danone, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer and Bayer across Europe & South America. 

Major Players, Insight, Strategy & Innovation Consultant (September 2012 – September 2013)

University of London Institute in Paris (2009-2012)

• Ba (Hons) French (Cultural) Studies (Second Class Honours)

Southend High School for Boys (2002-2009)

• A Levels: ABCC                                  
• GCSEs: 2 A*s, 4A's and 6B's – including an A in Maths and AB in English