It's exhilarating. I'll give you a "for instance" from my own point of view. I took over one brand when it had been declining for three years. We analyzed the business and wrote a marketing plan. Currently it is the fastest growing product in the entire industry! Out of all 10 brands in the market, ours is growing the fastest, after declining three years in a row. It's been tremendous for me and for the people who have worked on that business to watch it respond to a plan that we put together. It is one of the most satisfying experiences I've ever had.
As a marketing assistant, I was in charge of both consumer and trade promotion for my brand. This, I think, is typical for an assistant of any sort, be it marketing assistant or assistant product manager. Consumer promotion responsibility did not necessarily mean determining the consumer event in which we were to participate, but merely going through the steps with the product manager to set up a consumer promotion plan for the year. With trade promotion, it was basically the same thing. You've got to determine trade levels and communicate that to the trade. What you are essentially doing is keeping a fairly detailed set of books to find out exactly how much you are spending versus budget per program, and so forth.
I was working for a product' manager but was basically "training" to understand the whole advertising function. I was working on a national brand, so I was working very closely with a large advertising agency. Once the consumer promotion budget and trade promotion budget are established, deals and events are devised to fit within that budget. I monitored this throughout the year as an ongoing project. I also monitored competitive trade deals, so we were aware of what competitive companies were doing and how much they were spending.
As an assistant product manager, I got a broad exposure to everything. I started to make advertising and media decisions, while still doing the consumer and trade promotion work. The product manager and I were working together rather than doing separate functions. As an assistant product manager I started doing the day-to-day functions of running the brand, whereas the product manager was doing the long-range planning. The product manager still had veto power over my decisions, but I made recommendations, and they were accepted or changed.
There is a very close working relationship between an assistant and a product manager. The product manager knows more and has a letter idea of the big picture than the assistant does. This is frustrating at times, because it's very hard to understand the whole puzzle if there are any couple of pieces missing.
They talk about brand managers burning out. I don't know if that really happens, but it seems that upper management likes to get new brood into the brands every year and a half or so. I think it's particularly true that if you were "raised on the brand" as an assistant, you will not become a product manager on that brand. Often you might be moved to a product manager spot on a different brand in a different department. They are cross-fertilizing, which provides broader experience for everybody and gets new thoughts and new blood into the whole system.
The next position for me is a group product manager, at which even I will be handling several products.
Q - How do you spend your time on an average day?
My days vary quite a bit. I generally have two to three meetings a day. The other day we had a two-hour creative meeting with our agency, where they were presenting new story boards on creative. We have reviews with our operations and distribution people on our production. We do lots of packaging changes, so we have meetings with our packaging and design people.
Generally I have "weeklies" with my assistants, and these meetings last from an hour to an hour and a half. The assistants run the meetings, they bring me up to date on what they are doing, and I give them my comments.
My assistants are in and out of my office all day, asking questions and constantly giving me information. They are in here fifteen or twenty times a day. Sometimes it's for ten seconds, sometimes it's for twenty minutes. There's a constant flow of people. Then there are the projects that I am working on alone without the help of my assistants.
This job is like being thrown to the wolves, because you have to do so many things at the same time. You don't have the luxury of working on one specific thing for a period of time. You have to do everything at once. You may be in the middle of an analysis and the phone starts ringing. You have to answer it, and you may have to put out a fire here and a fire there. The image of the spoke and the wheel applies herewith you in the middle handling all these different things, different stage groups, different projects.
I'm on the phone a lot, either with the sales force or with people in the staff groups calling for clarification. I talk to my account executive just about every day for at least a couple of minutes. I have meeting periodically with my boss to keep her up to date on what's happening but I don't see her all that often.
If I had to break my day down by activity, I spend about 2 percent of my time on the phone, 50 percent of my time in meetings, and the other 30 percent doing analyses, the mail, and miscellaneous kind of things. That 50 percent on meetings is fairly heavy, but it goes in spurts. Some days we have no meetings, and some days it's back-to-back meetings.
