Dairy Crest to centralise marketing
Dairy Crest is to merge its food and dairy brand marketing teams into one integrated hub as part of a corporate-wide restructure designed to improve efficiency.
Currently the company has two separate divisions housing food and dairy brands such as Clover spread and Friij milkshake. The reshuffle means the company’s marketers will no longer work on single brands and will instead sit across all ten of its products when the restructure is complete in April.
More than 50 marketers will be affected by the overhaul, although Dairy Crest declined to say whether it would lead to redundancies. It is not known how the move will affect the company’s senior marketers such as head of marketing for butters and spread Jeremy Coles and marketing director for food James Watson who joined the business last September.
The business says the move will allow brands such as Cathedral City cheese and Country Life milk to share shopper insights and best-practice advice with one another, activity it claims is difficult to do in the current set-up because brands are run in siloed units.
A spokesman for Dairy Crest, adds: “This is about making us as a business simpler to run internally. By combining the food and dairy marketing teams it gives us more critical mass and makes it easier for the teams to share insight on how our customers are engaging with our brands.”
It is hoped the move will allow the business to create a more coherent marketing strategy that can be applied across its key brands; Cathedral City, Country Life, Clover and Friij. All four were up 4 per cent by volume and 5 per cent in value over the nine month period to 31 December 2012, according to the business.
Last week, the business announced plans to shake up its business structure in a move aimed at saving at least £5m a year. Dairy Crest said it is ‘consolidating its organisation into a single structure focused on “consumer-driven” growth with an “integrated supply chain.
