Zoey Saunders.
Our Industry Profile takes a look at some of the professionals working across the advertising, adtech, marketing and media sector in Australia. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the buzzing industry.
Zoey Saunders: GM of Marketing at Saputo.
Time in current role:
I’ve been fortunate enough to lead the Marketing team at Saputo Dairy Australia for over three years now and it’s my favourite job to date.
How would you describe what the company does?
We manufacture and sell a range of high-quality dairy products, including some of Australia’s favourite brands like Devondale, Cheer, Tasmanian Heritage and Mersey Valley.
What do you do day to day?
My day is very diverse, I can be in a meeting with our agency to evaluate advertising, while the next I may be reviewing the monthly forecast with our sales and finance team or looking at pricing in market and across our brands to ensure we’re competitive. At the moment, I’m particularly enjoying understanding our consumer insights work and how it’s informing our new product development pipeline.
Define your job in one word:
Diverse.
I got into the industry because:
I love FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) and food, and because the ‘F’ stands for fast. Together, my team and I achieve a huge amount each day, working with products and brands that are most Australian households. It’s kept me interested for three decades so far.
What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role?
The dairy industry is a complex but vitally important industry in Australia, and I feel privileged to be a part of it. We process milk through our many manufacturing plants daily. As a marketing team, we need to ensure we are balancing consumers’ evolving needs for different dairy products at the right price, in the best packaging format, with commercial sustainability for the business and the industry. It’s a fine balance that requires a commercial and a consumer lens.
What’s the biggest industry wide challenge you’d like to see tackled?
Single source, cross-channel reach measurement for media. With the fragmentation in media, understanding true reach and being able to easily evaluate the effectiveness of media spend is increasingly challenging.
Who has been a great mentor to you and why?
I have had so many that I would feel terrible singling one out. My longest mentor has been a dear friend who I met early on in my career. He is from Bristol in the UK, which is where I’m from, and we connected over the Bristol football teams, but he has subsequently proven to be a sage sounding board for all my career decisions over the years. I find having a few mentors who know you very well and can provide different perspectives, really helps you weigh up decisions from different angles.
I’m a big advocate for mentoring and participate in the Saputo mentoring program as a mentor, something which I thoroughly enjoy and get a lot out of.
Words of advice for someone wanting a job like yours?
Enjoy the numbers! I spend as much time looking at the commercial numbers that underpin our business as I do on marketing. I really enjoy understanding how marketing contributes to the P&L of the business, and its critically important knowledge to be successful in most marketing roles.
If I wasn’t doing this for a living, I'd be:
Working in property. It’s my weekend guilty pleasure, tracking the property market.
My philosophy is:
Every day is an opportunity to be better than the day before. It’s the small increments, over time, that make the biggest impact.
My favourite advert is:
The classic M&Ms campaign is a favourite of mine for its product and brand centricity, humour and longevity.
Music and TV streaming habits:
I’m a simple human when it comes to streaming: Spotify and Netflix, two kids and work keep me busy, so I don’t get too much time to watch TV.
What do you subscribe to?
Australian Financial Review and Inside FMCG are my top 2 go-tos.
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
My first job was in a pub when I was 13. I started washing dishes and stayed there until I was 19, when I ended up running the bar. It was a fun start to work!
In five years’, time I'll be:
Supporting my youngest daughter to transition into school and my eldest through year 12 - both will be big milestones in our family! Whilst continuing to help bring quality dairy products to Australian tables.
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