Description

Job Title: Consumer Planning - Greece

Location: Athens

About the role

This role sits at the heart of the brand building engine in Diageo's Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region. As Consumer Planning Manager, you will act as the voice of the consumer and shopper, bringing clarity, provocation, and cultural relevance to brand and commercial decisions. You will partner closely with brand, commercial, and customer teams to shape bold strategies rooted in rich human insight. Reporting into the Head of Consumer Connections for CEE and embedded within the CEE consumer connections team, this role is essential in fuelling sustainable growth for Diageo's portfolio of iconic brands.

You will go far beyond traditional research execution. You'll be a culturally connected strategic thinker who blends commercial competence with empathy and creative curiosity to shape the future of our brands.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Business Partnering
  Act as a core member of your category brand team, leading the development and embedding of insight-led strategy and planning across all key initiatives.

• Fuel Growth Through Insight
  Deliver sharp, culturally relevant consumer and shopper provocations that shape brand positioning, comms development, innovation, and activation.

• Elevate Decision-Making
  Influence key partners with strong storytelling and fact-based thinking to ensure business decisions are led by deep consumer and shopper understanding.

• Best Practice Leadership
  Embed planning best practices across the CEE marketing community, building capability and championing insight-led growth across markets and partners.

• Culture & Foresight Integration
  Stay immersed in emerging trends and shifting behaviours, applying future-facing foresight to shape long-term category and brand plans.

Key Deliverables

Robust, Insight-Led Category & Brand Strategy aligned with CEE commercial priorities and global frameworks.

Develop actionable insights that unlock growth opportunities through positioning, innovation, communications, and portfolio strategy.

End-to-end planning leadership across key brand initiatives - from creative briefing to campaign evaluation - rooted in audience understanding.

Cultural fluency and foresight incorporated into planning processes to maintain brand relevance in rapidly evolving markets.

Capability uplift across CEE, embedding modern planning tools and approaches within marketing and commercial teams.

Skills & Capabilities

• Strategic Brand & Commercial Planning: Leads the application of insight to brand strategy, positioning, innovation, and comms development within a commercial growth framework.

• Advanced Quant & Qual Research Expertise: Confident in both the science and art of research, with strength in interpreting data and turning it into clear and impactful direction.

• Cultural Fluency & Foresight: Immersed in consumer culture and emerging behaviours across markets, applying foresight to future-proof strategies.

• Influence & Storytelling: Shapes decisions through compelling, evidence-based narratives that resonate with cross-functional and senior partners.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partners fluidly with marketing, commercial, innovation, and agency teams to deliver insight-led action and shared accountability for performance.

Mindsets & Behaviours

• Influence Through Insight: Uses strong critical thinking and commercial competence to frame opportunities, challenge assumptions, and shape decisions that drive long-term growth.

• Collaborate with Purpose: Builds strong relationships across teams and markets, navigating a matrixed environment with confidence, openness, and accountability.

• Simplify and Systematise: Seeks clarity in complexity, designing simple, scalable ways of working that improve consistency, efficiency and focus across teams.

• Think Bold, Act Agile: Brings a growth mindset to every challenge - stays flexible, embraces change, and looks beyond constraints to imagine new possibilities.

• Act Decisively: Prioritises what matters, adapts in ambiguity, and acts with urgency and clarity to drive insight-led decision making.

Requirements

• 8+ years' experience in consumer insight, strategic planning, or brand strategy roles, preferably within FMCG, luxury or related industries.

• Proven track record of using insight to drive strategic brand and business growth.

• Deep experience in quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and applying findings into commercial and creative decision-making.

• Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders with strong storytelling and strategic thinking.

• High cultural curiosity, grounded commercial approach, and passion for consumers, culture, and creativity.

• Fluency in English; other CEE market languages a plus.

• Regional or multi-market experience highly desirable.

Flexible Working Statement:

Flexibility is key to our success. From part-time and compressed hours to different locations, our people work flexibly in ways to suit them. Talk to us about what flexibility means to you so that you're supported from day one.

Diversity statement:

Our purpose is to celebrate life, every day, everywhere! And creating an inclusive culture, where everyone feels valued and that they can belong, is a crucial part of this.

We embrace diversity in the broadest possible sense. This means that you'll be welcomed and celebrated for who you are just by being you. You'll be part of and help build and champion an inclusive culture that celebrates people of different gender, ethnicity, ability, age, sexual orientation, social class, educational backgrounds, experiences, and more.

Our ambition is to create the best performing, most trusted and respected consumer products companies in the world. Join us and help transform our business as we take our brands to the next level and build new ones as part of shaping the next generation of celebrations for consumers around the world.

Feel inspired? Then this may be the opportunity for you!