I was the first marketing manager at my former company, which meant not only finding where did my position fit in, but also document it for the posterity of the organisation.
🔍 Background Destination Beverage has been a beverage importer and supplier in Singapore since 2013. Specialising in foreign brands, the start-up is also the agent for 11 brands, meaning that they have exclusive distribution and a mission of brand development on the Singapore market.
With a start-up format, Destination Beverage had relied in the past on internships for marketing-related missions. Those were not necessarily a priority before, and the focus had always been acquiring new accounts and upselling on the existing ones.
However, the strategy shifted as I arrived, promoting marketing as a way to support the sales, and durably build the brands. The agencies were therefore granted marketing budget from the brands, combined with a bigger expectation in terms of volume.
🧭 Problem Definition Because the company had been running for a while but without any predecessor at my position, it was up to me to determine a proper job description with concrete day to day actions. If my goals as "brand developer" and "product marketer" were agreed, the concrete plan of actions remained free for me to build.
📝 Contingencies New industry, foreign market. With a background in IT and an education mainly in France, both industry and market were new. In this configuration, both market research online and on the field are required to get a full picture of the industry dynamic and the market interactions : competitors, key stakeholders and influencers, strategic dates and times of the year...
🗺️ Solution Pairing marketing and sales. A positive aspect in a start up is that flexibility and agility is at its peak. So there was a real push for me to go on the field and visit customers on sales visits despite not being a sales person per say. By breaking this barrier, it allowed to quickly get an understanding on the KPIs that I could set for the department, the resources that I would need, and overall provide a good idea of the market.
Relying on the local resources. I also got to spend a large amount of time with my colleagues to understand their scope of actions and tools used. By being more aware of the daily tasks, I was able to integrate new missions for internal purposes, so that whatever I would bring to the table would still fit in. For instance, there was a significant increase in the number of trade deals after a promotion I worked on, which meant a larger amount of bottles moved at the same time. This impacted therefore the rythm of purchase of stock, to anticipate the exit of stock. That is why I chose to implement a bi-weekly internal email blast with the marketing initiatives over the following 2 months.
Standard of operations (SOP). From explaining globally my missions, to detailing day to day tasks or even listing the key contacts, I wrote up a Marketing SOP and shared it with the company. Such a document is an ideal set of references of my missions and providing a concrete scope of actions to the complete company. I deliberately put it on our Google Drive for it to be flexible, and adaptable to the evolution of the company.
✅ Assessment
In terms of operations, the marketing was fully integrated, so that eventually I was asked to attend sales management meetings.
Moreover, a proper budget from the company was assigned to the department a few month after I came in.
A good example of the successful implementation would be the establishment of a claiming process for the marketing budgets from the brands: after a few months gathering information of each brands requirements, way of working, required proofs of costs or execution and timelines, I managed to establish a clear course of actions for us to follow.
When it comes to the market perception, the picture above is a funny glimpse of the perception as the ambassador for our agencies ("Mother of All Products").