Lead Research and Insights

About Us:

As a Fortune 50 company with more than 350,000 team members worldwide, Target is an iconic brand and one of America's leading retailers. Working at Target means the opportunity to help all families discover the joy of everyday life. Caring for our communities is woven into who we are, and we invest in the places we collectively live, work and play. We prioritize relationships, fuel and develop talent by creating growth opportunities, and succeed as one Target team. At our core, our purpose is ingrained in who we are, what we value, and how we work. It's how we care, grow, and win together. Target is one of the best-loved and most recognized retail brands in the market.

Our Enterprise Insights team helps run the business today, while also focusing on the growing the business for the future. We do this by anticipating and effectively responding to challenges and fuelling Target's growth—today, and into the future—regardless of the changes ahead. Here, you will work with internal partners and external agencies in a wide variety of roles. You will also have the opportunity to develop skills across our team superpowers, including consumer & marketing insights, strategic problem solving, strategy activation, experimentation, and scaling new businesses.

Research & Insights Team Overview:

As a part of the Research & Insights team in Target in India (TII) you will be aligned to the Marketing and Brand Insights team within Enterprise Insights Pyramid that serves as Target's source of truth for Consumer & Marketing Intelligence. The team is responsible for developing actionable insights that inform Target's corporate strategy, planning, and portfolio decisions. To do so, the team produces analytically ambitious, predictive intelligence with compelling narratives that help shape Target's short and long term aspirations. The team operates in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment. Each team member develops a deep and proactive understanding of the rapidly evolving industry, consumer and marketing drivers and trends. The Lead Research and Insights will be responsible for generating strategic competitive intelligence and insights grounded in data analytics.

A role on the Enterprise Insights team means you will be a champion for our current and future guests, inspiring the organization to act in their best interest. You will help partners build consumer-centric strategies and activations.

As a Lead – Research & Insights, you have responsibility for building Enterprise-wide empathy and understanding of consumers based upon important demographics, behaviours, needs, and attitudes. You will be responsible for designing and executing guest or consumer research to support key initiatives. You will be the primary contact for internal partners and will identify the appropriate research method, data source and vendor/supplier to execute work.

Core responsibilities of this job are described within this job description. Job duties may change at any time due to business needs. 

Position Overview:

The candidate will be responsible for the following:

• Support Director – Marketing & Brand Insights and Leads in the generation of analytically ambitious, predictive studies on Target's Marketing efforts, with compelling narratives
• Develop insights and intelligence for emerging market conditions and consumer behaviour
• Serve as a trusted expert in extracting meaningful competitive insights from panel, POS and traffic data
• Develop and maintain tools and routines to drive proactive understanding and monitoring of competitor's profiles, recent developments, strategic priorities, and drivers of performance
• Respond with urgency to leadership ad hoc requests
• Leverage depth and breadth of internal and external data sources for generating holistic and unbiased insights
• Partner with other insights teams to align monitoring efforts, integrate insights and promote information sharing
• Establish Marketing & Brand Insights capability within Research & Insights team in Target in India (TII), and serve as an subject matter expert of marketing intelligence for the broader team in TII.
• Create long term vision and translate them in to process improvement initiatives, build partnerships, develop annual / quarterly plan(s) leveraging Target in India's existing capabilities and synergies.

Key Relationships:

The candidate will be responsible for maintaining all of the following relationships:

• Reports to Director – Insights & Strategy, Target in India
• Aligned to Marketing & Brand Insights Director while supporting other Enterprise Insights leaders
• Ongoing working relationships with other Insights functions across the organization
• Other key relationships with Marketing partners

About You:

• Minimum of 8 years of experience in retail or CPG industry and an understanding of industry dynamics and the competitive landscape across channels, categories
• Proven analytical skills and understanding of drivers of retail, marketing performance and metrics to enable root cause analysis
• Technical expertise leveraging multiple sources of data including syndicated resources (VIQ, IRI or Nielsen; Scan, Panel, Spectra, etc.) to extract meaningful insights
• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and data visualization tools
• Ability to drive structure out of ambiguity, navigate disparate insights, and synthesize datasets to build a compelling story
• Methodical, well-organized, and detail-oriented
• Genuine curiosity with how things work; motivated, self-starter, team player
• Ability to deal with multiple priorities and strong drive for results
• Exposure to global working model and familiarity with US retail market
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills