Sr. Director Insights

Overview

Job Description The Senior Director, Insights serves as the enterprise leader for consumer, shopper, and market insights across the Wells brand portfolio, and other ecosystem brands from Ferrero and Ferrara. This role is accountable for shaping the long-term insights strategy that informs brand growth, innovation, product testing, and portfolio decisions, ensuring the voice of the consumer is embedded at the highest levels of business strategy.

As a senior strategic partner to Brand, Innovation, R&D, Sales, and executive leadership, the Senior Director translates complex consumer data into clear, actionable insight that drives demand creation, accelerates innovation pipelines, and fuels sustainable, profitable growth. This leader sets the vision for consumer learning, builds world-class insights capabilities, and establishes a culture of consumer-first decision-making across the organization.

Accountabilities

• Set and Lead Enterprise Insights Function:
Define and evolve the consumer, shopper and market insights vision and strategy across Wells brands, ecosystem brands (from Ferrero and Ferrara), ensuring consumer and shopper understanding is at the core of driving business strategy and brand growth. Oversee and manage the Insights budget, ensuring efficient allocation of resources to priorities and fiscal accountability.

• Champion Brand and Innovation Growth:
Extract and translate insights into clear opportunities to inform product innovation, brand position and go-to-market strategies. Identify emerging trends (macro, market, consumer), white spaces and cultural shifts to inform future growth platforms.

• Drive Integrated, Data-Driven Decision-Making:
Leverage analytics, syndicated data (Nielsen, Circana, Numerator and other panel resources) and custom research to generate actionable insights to deliver clear actions and implications across the consumer path to purchase, consumption and repurchase.

• Team Leadership & Capability Building:
Lead and foster a strong culture of consumer-centric thinking and consumer curiosity and tying it to the business. Lead the vision and development of Insights best practices, setting the gold standard for insights extraction. Develop a team of Insights Managers, fostering a culture of creativity, accountability, and high performance. Drive internal capability building in consumer insight extraction, tools, and agile methodologies.

• Executive Partnership & Influence:
Act as a trusted advisor to senior and executive leadership, bringing an objective, consumer-led perspective that shapes brand strategy, innovation investment, product design, commercialization, and communications decisions.

Qualifications

EDUCATION:

Bachelor’s Degree required; MBA or advanced degree strongly preferred.

EXPERIENCE:

15+ years of progressive leadership in Consumer Insights, Market Research, or Analytics, preferably within CPG or adjacent industries.

SPECIFICATIONS:

• Knowledge Deep expertise in consumer, shopper, and market behavior, including the full path to purchase across channels and categories. Advanced knowledge of insights methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, syndicated data (e.g., Nielsen, Circana), analytics, and emerging research approaches. Strong understanding of brand strategy, innovation pipelines, go-to-market models, and portfolio management within a CPG or adjacent environment. Awareness of macro consumer, cultural, and category trends shaping future growth opportunities.

• Skills Enterprise-level strategic thinking and synthesis—translating complex, multi-source data into clear business implications and growth opportunities. Executive storytelling and influence, with the ability to shape decisions and investment priorities at senior leadership levels. Organizational leadership and talent development, including building high-performing teams and advancing insights capabilities. Financial and resource management skills, including budget ownership, prioritization, and vendor stewardship.

• Abilities Ability to lead and make decisions in highly ambiguous, fast-moving environments while balancing rigor and speed. Ability to anticipate future consumer…