Sales and Marketing Blogs
Welcome to the Sales and Marketing blog page!
Feel free to post comments and come back to share more experiences with our sales & marketing graduates.
An Introduction
Posted by Graeme on 16 Oct 08
As this is my first blog its probably best that I introduce myself and briefly out line how I came to be on the Cadbury Graduate scheme.
My name is Graeme and I graduated from Edinburgh Uni in June 2006 with a Mechanical Engineering degree. I then went travelling for a year, had a fantastic time and many valuable ‘life experiences’ and arrived back in the UK too late for all the Sept ’07 graduate schemes. So this time last year I applied to quite a lot of the major graduate programmes, focusing mainly within FMCG and to cut a long story short, I was lucky enough to be offered a job with Cadbury at Christmas time. I was scheduled to start in September but decided that I would prefer to start sooner and as a result I moved to London and started in my first role, as a Grocery Sales Executive, at the end of March.
This role involved visiting Supermarkets, checking that Cadbury products were where they should be and trying to improve Cadbury’s presence in store. The key phrase that you hear over and over again about field sales, whether it’s dealing with supermarkets (Grocery) or smaller independent stores (Impulse), is that “its a great grounding in the business”, and its true. You’ll really quickly get a good understanding of our products and customers as well as developing some core selling skills. There are frustrating aspects to the role, especially wasting time sitting in traffic or trying to find the person you need in a huge store when you are under pressure to get all your visits done. However, overall I got on really well with my team mates, learnt a lot about Cadbury and the major retailers and enjoyed the satisfaction of successfully influencing people.
After almost five months in that role, the company restructured our sales force so it was an appropriate time to move to my next role, which I have now been in for 7 weeks. My new title is Grocery Space Planner and my main responsibility is to provide merchandising solutions (basically how products should be displayed) for the major Grocers. This is based at the Head Office in Uxbridge and a big part of what I’ve been doing so far in the role has just been meeting all the relevant people, finding out what they do and getting an understanding of how all the commercial departments and teams fit together.
I’m conscious that this is getting pretty long so I’ll save more info about my current role for my next entry. I’ll finish up though by saying that I remember reading the Cadbury Graduate’s blogs last year and being a bit cynical about how positive all the entries were. Now its my turn and I can honestly say that although there are parts of both roles that aren’t the best fun and there have been some Sunday nights where I didn’t really fancy working the next day, my overall experience has been really positive. I am delighted I came to work here; there is loads of opportunity to learn and work with great people and great brands, so I definitely recommend that you apply.
So best of luck and I’ll probably meet some of you soon.
A Glass and a half of hard work!
Posted by Emilie on 02 Oct 08
Wow, I can’t quite believe it but I’ve now been working at Cadbury for more than a year! It was a bit of a strange feeling when I spoke to my friends who were heading back to university again this September and it made me realise that I’m definitely not a student anymore – I even wake up early on weekends now! I’m loving it though. It may not be the 9 to 5 I’d been hoping for (the hours tend to be just slightly longer than that…) but I really enjoy what I’m doing, everyone in the office is lovely and my bank balance gets a nice boost every 4 weeks.
In case you were wondering, I went to the University of St. Andrews and studied Economics and Italian but decided that neither of those subjects were quite what I wanted to work with so instead I went for Cadbury’s Marketing and Sales Grad Programme which sounded like the right mix of working and learning on the job.
My first placement was in Field Sales (Grocery) which was all about making sure that our products in store were in the very best position they could be to maximise sales as well as to sell in incremental stock. It was an interesting role and invaluable in teaching me about the brands we and our competitors have as well as how the market works.
Now I work on the Cadbury Dairy Milk brand team and I couldn’t ask for a more interesting role! The opportunity to work on our flagship brand with its hugely exciting production house Glass and A Half Full Productions (Gorilla, Trucks) is something I’ve been very lucky to get as there is always something new and exciting happening.
Right now, I highly recommend that you all try the new CDM bars out there: Cranberry & Granola and Apricot Crumble Crunch. I promise I’m not trying to hard sell here, but I am absolutely addicted to the Cranberry one – it’s so good!
Actually that might be the worst thing about working here; chocolate is not exactly difficult to come by (or to eat). But we do have a gym in our new office building so really it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
I’ve also realised that Marketing isn’t as ‘fluffy’ as so many people seem to think it is – there’s a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes, a lot of data analysis and strategy planning, I could go on. It’s all worth it though when you see a campaign you’ve been working hard on go out and increase sales, it gives you a real feeling of satisfaction.
On that note however, considering that I’ve written half an essay, I must leave you and get back to the day job so I can finish all the work I need to do before going on holiday tomorrow!
3 year Anniversary!
Posted by Sandie on 01 Oct 08
The last few weeks have been so busy that I didn’t even clock my three year anniversary of working here which I’ve now realised was two weeks ago!
Who knew that three years on from joining Cadbury as a commercial leader of the future, I would spend the majority of my days talking about Gorillas, Airport Trucks, Chocolate Making Machines and A Glass and A Half of Fresh Milk!
Great Expectations!
Posted by Jill on 30 Sep 08
I’m now 3 months off the grad scheme and in my first permanent role as Assistant Brand Manager (ABM) on Trident and I definitely can’t complain about having a lack of exposure - I’m now in meetings with the big guns (our managing director, the head of Europe and their leadership team) explaining the performance and plans for Trident. Last week I presented to all 300 sales guys at our national sales conference and to my relief it seemed to go down pretty well so they’re convinced that we have some good plans for Trident next year and are ready to sell it in to our customers.
So what’s expected of an ABM? This is a question I posed to my mentor (who heads up our giving and seasonal team) and his response was that you should have a really good understanding of the brand, so this means knowing the sales data that comes in (how much are we selling? Which flavours are selling best? Why is that? Where are our products ‘in distribution’, i.e. how many stores are stocking them? Is there more of Trident in supermarkets or corner stores? How does this affect who’s buying it?etc.)
So any time our marketing director drops by my desk, I should know the answer to these and the more ‘consumer’ measures which include knowing what people think of our adverts, how many of them recognise the ad and know what brand it’s advertising, how many of them say we are one of their favourite brands, how many say they intend buying us and who is it that buys us – what age, buying behaviour and socio-economic class do they belong to? Knowing all this should give you a pretty clear picture of what you need to do with your brand… which is where it get’s really interesting….and unfortunately confidential so I can’t share with you how we’re planning on making Trident even bigger in the next year but suffice to say it’s pretty cool to think that I’m around when this brand is 18months old and in 50 years time people will have grown up with this brand and have the same love for it as they do for a Crunchie, or Twirl, Wispa or a bar of Dairy Milk.
Sample time!
Posted by Vicky on 04 Jul 08
Have just started a new role in sales, so had the pleasure of spending the last 2 days listening about (and eating!) all the exciting new products we have planned for next year. Many have overdosed on the samples though - glad we've got that new staff gym - better start running all that chocolate off!
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