Consumer Science & Product Research Consultant; Temporary

The Home & Garden business unit of Spectrum Brands is based in St. Louis, Missouri with distribution, manufacturing and sales offices throughout the US and globe. We are a leading supplier of consumer products nationally for the home, lawn and garden, insect and weed control markets. We deliver groundbreaking products of exceptional value and top-notch quality to consumers with our well-recognized brands including Spectracide®, Hot Shot®, Cutter®, Repel®, Black Flag®, Garden Safe®, Eco Logic® and Liquid Fence®.

• This is a limited term employment opportunity.
• We are anticipating this role will last 5 to 6 months (40 hrs/week).
• Travel Expectation:
  This role is expected to travel up to 3 days every 2 to 4 weeks to our Earth City, MO corporate office.

The Consumer Science & Product Research consultant will establish and lead the creation of an R&D-focused consumer science capability that enables the Global Home Care organization to make faster, more confident product development decisions.

This role sits within Research & Development and is focused on applying consumer learning to product formulation, performance validation, prototype development, benchmarking, and technical decision making. The role is not intended to duplicate Marketing or Consumer Insights functions such as brand strategy, segmentation, communications testing, or market assessment. Instead, it focuses on understanding how consumers experience products, identifying performance gaps, validating product solutions, and translating consumer feedback into actionable product development recommendations.

The successful candidate will build scalable processes that allow R&D teams to continuously incorporate consumer learning throughout the product development process, reducing technical risk and increasing the likelihood of product success.

• Develop an R&D consumer science strategy that complements Marketing and Consumer Insights activities while focusing specifically on product performance and technical decision making.
• Lead validation of Consumer usage experience, confirming product solutions deliver against expectations, as defined through validated concepts to meet the 3-year IMP and QIR.
• Build standardized approaches for understanding how consumers use, evaluate, and experience product performance throughout development.
• Translate consumer observations into actionable technical recommendations for formulation and product development teams.
• Ensure product performance gaps, usage barriers, and unmet functional needs are translated into actionable R&D opportunities.

• Design and execute comprehensive competitive product benchmarking studies to identify points of difference and opportunities to improve performance.
• Develop standardized benchmarking protocols across key product categories.
• Analyze competitive product claims, performance characteristics, usage experience, and consumer product evaluations.
• Generate technical insights from competitive products that influence R&D priorities.
• Partner with Marketing and Insights to analyze ratings and reviews, identifying consumer dissatisfiers, unmet needs and opportunity areas for product performance.
• Identify recurring product performance complaints, usage frustrations, and improvement opportunities.
• Provide recurring insight reports to R&D leadership and project teams.

Develop and manage an R&D-focused consumer research program including:

• In-Home Use Tests (IHUTs)
• Central Location Tests (CLTs)
• Product concept feasibility assessments, prototype evaluations, and product experience validation
• Qualitative product…