Morrisons brand and marketing director Belinda Youngs to leave

Morrisons’ corporate brand and marketing director Belinda Youngs is set to leave the supermarket later this year as part of a restructure of the business that sees the creation of its first own-brand unit. 

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Morrisons’ corporate brand and marketing director Belinda Youngs is set to leave the supermarket with her own brand brief passed to a new unit.

Youngs will stay on until later in the year to oversee marketing of Morrisons’ value propositioning, upcoming loyalty scheme and the launch of the Morrisons Marketing Academy.

Her responsibilities for own brand will be handled by the newly created own-brand unit that will be responsible for overseeing everything about own brand, from sourcing to packaging and marketing. It will come under the control of Morrisons’ trading division and be led by trading director Andy Atkinson, who reports into group trading director Casper Meijer.

Meijer says: “Combining these elements will give us a real opportunity to further leverage this hugely important part of our business. Optimising our sourcing and reducing our range are the next steps on our strategy to enable us to achieve our goal of offering customers £ for £ the best value for money.”

Morrisons announced last month that it was conducting a review of its own-label products as part of its three-year turnaround plan. That also includes a £1bn investment in price as it takes on the discount grocers Aldi and Lidl, which are both seeing double-digit sales growth.

A Morrisons spokesperson says the decision to set up an own-brand unit comes as it looks to leverage its manufacturing expertise within own brand and market it to the customer as “made by us”. The supermarket set up an own-brand sourcing team in September.

Youngs joined Morrisons as own brand director in 2012 before being promoted to the new role of corporate brand and marketing director last year. She reports into Nick Collard, who is marketing and customer director. 

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