Birds Eye creates new CCO role as it scraps its CMO position

Frozen foods giant Birds Eye is the latest brand to scrap the chief marketing officer role as it appoints former managing director Andy Weston-Webb to the newly-created role of chief commercial officer (CCO).

Birds Eye Fish Fingers

Weston-Webb has been managing director of Birds Eye since 2011, but his new role as CCO will bring together Category Marketing, R&D and Group Sales into one function. As a result, the role of CMO no longer exists.

The company’s former CMO Luca Miggiano left the company in October.

Weston-Webb has extensive experience of marketing, operations and leading local markets, having worked at Mars for four years as president of chocolate for Western Europe before moving over to Birds Eye.

In a company statement, he said: “It’s never been more important to have an integrated consumer and customer approach guiding our group strategy, brands and innovation and bringing together Category Marketing, R&D and Group Sales will help us to achieve that goal.

“With our recent acquisition of Findus in Europe, we are well positioned to leverage this expertise across an even greater scale.”

Wayne Hudson of Young’s Seafood will join the company to replace Weston-Webb as the new Birds Eye MD.

A move away from the CMO role

Birds Eye isn’t the only brand to scrap the CMO role in favour of a broader position where the marketing department is merged with areas such as business and sales.

In March 2014, Asda promoted its chief marketing officer Stephen Smith to the newly created role of chief customer officer as part of a reorganisation of the retailer’s executive team.

Smith has since been replaced by Barry Williams, who was appointed chief customer officer in January this year. Besides marketing, Williams’ chief customer officer role also encompasses Asda’s health, store, pricing and customer relationship programmes.

Other retailers have also followed suit. In July last year, Tesco announced that it would be putting Jill Easterbrook in charge of its marketing, scrapping the CMO role and making her chief customer officer. However, she has since left the post to become group business transformation director at Tesco.

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