John Broome, Kellogg marketing director, is to exit as part of a sweeping restructure of the marketing division, AdNews can reveal.
The restructure will see insights split out from the marketing function and a director level insights leader join the leadership team at Kellogg alongside marketing, reporting directly to the managing director.
The standalone insights and commercial planning department will be integrated across all commercial activities. The move is designed to help drive growth in a category where growth is becoming increasingly hard to come by. Kellogg has created an insight hub that is intended to be the source of growth driving insights that can be played back into all levels of the business.
It has also stripped back the marketing director function to oversee just Australia, handing responsibility for New Zealand marketing activity to the country lead for the NZ business. The intention is for the marketing director to be more executionally focused.
Tamara Howe, currently innovation director, will take on the new marketing director role. Howe will lead the integrated portfolio teams that will focus on brand marketing, shopper activation and innovation for Australia.
She has been with Kellogg for 12 years including stints in the US headquarters and is credited with doubling the rate of innovation at Kellogg Australia since taking on the innovation role in 2014.
The move plays in line with comments made by Millward Brown Vermeer CMO Marc de Swaan Arons this week at the AANA Reset conference, about the importance of insights to building a customer centric organisation.
He told AdNews earlier this week that insights would “leapfrog” marketing in their importance within organisation. However, Australian firms currently lag in terms of the number of firms that have an insights leader reporting directly in to senior management. De Swaan Arons said that currently around 70% of insights teams report in to marketing, but that he expects it to swing the other way.
Broome, who has been marketing director for three and a half years, played a role in developing the new structure at Kellogg.
He told AdNews today that it is “the right time to hand over the marketing leadership of a great brand portfolio”.
“We need to continuously think about the right way to organise our capabilities to win in the future and the changes now being implemented will enable Kellogg to do that with confidence,” he added.
Broome is understood to be taking some time off before taking on a new opportunity in 2016.
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