Kampenhout, Flemish Region, Belgium
- Responsible for: Eastern Europe, Africa, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, Italy and several Middle-Eastern customers. (€3.5m) - Build sales and marketing plans for each individual market. - Keep track of market trends and adjust strategies accordingly. - Accurate forecasting for both sales and production planning.
- Responsible for all export markets. (€2.8m) - Re-positioning and premiumization of existing brands. - Modernizing working methods. - Limited attention to private labels for specific markets.
.- Temporary assignment to help out with the start up of the brewery. Assignment of 1 year which turned out to be 2 years. - Primary focus on the export of the beers, which soon represented 95% of the brewery's total. - Providing marketing and commercial insights for the Belgian domestic market. - Turn a hobby-brewery into a professional organisation on all levels: from marketing to logisitcs to invoicing to day to day business.
- Responsible for sales of all none-European countries, with a high focus on the Asian market. Creating new customers and follow up. (China, Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Laos) - Follow up and point of contact on existing customers (Russia, Thailand, Brazil, Emirates, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Chile, Dominican Republic, Greece, Latvia, Mexico, Taiwan, Israel, US...) - In this relatively short period of time, I managed to increase sales from 7500Hl to 11000Hl, with long lasting relationships, that will certainly still increase the sales for a long period of time. - Including support, negotiating prices, prospecting, follow up on marketing strategies with the individual importers, setting targets for importers. - Frequent traveling to the larger importers/clients.
- As the marketing department was none-existing by the time I started here, I had the chance to set it up from 0. - As in the past, no priorities were set on marketing, we had a very large campaign budget in 2013 to put our brands back in the focus of end consumers. A campaign budget of +1 million Euro was used. Together with the owner and the commercial director, I followed up on this budget. - Identifying brand identities, brand positioning, analyzing market studies (Nielsen + GFK), Trade marketing, sponsorships, brand protection etc were also my responsibilities.