Vice President, Consumer Insights & Marketing Intelligence

Dairy Queen; BLOOMINGTON (MN); On-site; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

International Dairy Queen, Inc. in Minneapolis, MN, seeks a strategic leader to serve as Vice President, Consumer Insights & Marketing Intelligence. You will oversee consumer behavior, marketplace dynamics, and marketing effectiveness to accelerate brand growth.

You will establish vision, capabilities, and roadmaps for insights, embed consumer perspectives in planning, and guide a high-performing team to deliver actionable intelligence that drives business results.

Responsibilities

• Lead high-priority consumer learning initiatives from framing questions to design, synthesis, and activation.
• Oversee brand health, equity, and marketing effectiveness analytics to inform strategy.

Job description

• Full-time
• Job Duration: At-will

Company Description

About International Dairy Queen, Inc. International Dairy Queen, Inc. (IDQ), based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the parent company of American Dairy Queen Corporation and Dairy Queen Canada, Inc. Through its subsidiaries, IDQ develops, licenses, and services a system of more than 7,800 DQ restaurants in more than 20 countries. IDQ is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. For more information, visit DairyQueen.com.

Here at IDQ, we create extraordinary Fan experiences every day and we do this through our commitment to hiring and retaining only the best in class talent. We firmly believe that our employees are the catalyst to the success of the company where their initiative, strategic thinking, and entrepreneurial spirit are recognized and rewarded. We're looking for motivated, passionate and dedicated individuals with an inherent need and ambition to go after bigger challenges.

Job Description

Job Overview

The Vice President, Consumer Insights & Marketing Intelligence, serves as Dairy Queen's authority on consumer brands, the marketplace, and marketing effectiveness. This leader drives a deep understanding of consumer behavior and market dynamics, translating insights into strategies and recommendations that accelerate brand growth and business performance.

As a trusted advisor to senior leadership, the Vice President establishes the vision, capabilities, and roadmap for Consumer Insights and Marketing Intelligence, ensuring consumer and competitive perspectives are embedded in key decisions. The role connects consumer research, brand health, marketing effectiveness, marketplace intelligence, and business performance to provide actionable foresight and strategic direction.

This hands-on leader personally guides high-priority research and analytics efforts, develops a high-performing team, and fosters a culture that converts insights into measurable business results.

Principal Accountabilities:

• Serve as the organizational authority on DQ consumers, developing a holistic understanding of their needs, motivations, behaviors, occasions, and decision drivers.
• Identify consumer-driven opportunities to strengthen the brand and drive short- and long-term growth.
• Develop and lead foundational learning agendas focused on areas such as consumer segmentation, target definition, attitudes and behaviors, needs and occasions, customer journeys, brand positioning, and emerging consumer needs.
• Ensure consumer understanding informs annual business and marketing planning as well as longer-term strategic planning.
• Integrate qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, syndicated, and business information to create a comprehensive perspective rather than relying on individual studies or data sources.
• Establish mechanisms to disseminate and embed foundational consumer learning across the organization, so that knowledge accumulates and is leveraged over time.
• Embed consumer understanding throughout Dairy Queen's go-to-market process, partnering with Marketing and cross-functional teams to influence strategy, consumer propositions, menu and innovation, targeting, positioning, promotions, communications, customer experience, and activation.
• Bring insights into early decisions to shape strategy and deliver research and reporting to validate decisions after they have been made.
• Develop a deep understanding of the consumer journey and the drivers of brand consideration, choice, purchase, and loyalty.
• Partner with Marketing and agency teams to understand what Dairy Queen should say, how it should say it, to whom, and where in the consumer journey communications can have the greatest impact.
• Personally lead or actively contribute to high-priority and complex consumer learning initiatives from initial business-question framing through research design, synthesis, recommendation, and activation.
• Lead Dairy Queen's understanding of brand health, equity, salience, consideration, preference, perceptions, competitive positioning, and the drivers of brand growth.
• Establish an integrated approach to understanding how marketing influences consumer perceptions, behavior, and business performance.
• Partner with Marketing and agency teams to continuously improve campaign strategy, creative execution, and overall marketing effectiveness.
• Develop approaches and learning agendas for creative and campaign evaluation, from early strategy and development through in-market and post-campaign learning.
• Partner with Business Intelligence & Analytics, Marketing, and other stakeholders to integrate brand and consumer measures with Marketing Mix Modeling, Return on Marketing Spend, media measurement, and business results to develop a holistic perspective on marketing effectiveness.
• Identify and communicate learning across campaigns and initiatives so that Dairy Queen systematically improves its marketing effectiveness over time in addition to evaluating individual programs.
• Build and maintain an integrated understanding of the restaurant marketplace and the broader forces influencing Dairy Queen consumers.
• Monitor changes in consumer behavior, culture, technology, competition, category dynamics, and the marketing environment to identify emerging growth opportunities and potential threats.
• Establish foresight capabilities that help Dairy Queen distinguish meaningful signals of change from noise and prepare the organization for future consumer and marketplace shifts.
• Translate trends and marketplace intelligence into implications and choices
• Proactively bring emerging consumer and marketplace opportunities to senior leadership and challenge existing assumptions when the evidence suggests the business should think differently.

Insights Excellence, Innovation & Capability Building:

• Establish the strategic roadmap for Consumer Insights & Marketing Intelligence and continually evolve the function to meet the future needs of Dairy Queen.
• Ensure excellence in qualitative and quantitative research design, execution, analysis, interpretation, and storytelling.
• Explore, test, and adopt emerging research methodologies, behavioral approaches, and tech-enabled capabilities that can create greater speed, depth, or competitive advantage.
• Develop a strategic ecosystem of research, data, technology, and consulting partners, ensuring Dairy Queen leverages their intellectual capabilities as well as their executional resources.
• Create a culture of meta-learning by connecting findings across research, marketing initiatives, time periods, and data sources to identify patterns and generate new insights.
• Steward organizational understanding of consumer insights and marketing effectiveness, helping business partners become better consumers and users of research and evidence.
• Serve as a trusted strategic advisor to senior leadership and cross-functional partners, bringing an objective and evidence-based consumer and marketplace perspective into critical business decisions.
• Maintain direct involvement in high-priority initiatives by framing business questions, shaping research and analytical approaches, challenging assumptions and methodology, interpreting results, and developing the ultimate business recommendation.
• Reduce complexity in decision-making by reconciling disparate information and translating large amounts of consumer, marketing, marketplace, and business information into a clear point of view.
• Build strong partnerships across Marketing, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Operations, R&D, and other key functions.
• Effectively navigate and influence within a franchise system, considering the needs of consumers, franchisees, and the enterprise when developing recommendations.
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