Position: Trade Marketing & Distribution Manager.
Location: Jebel Ali Freezone, Dubai, UAE.
Reports to: Director of Global Sales & Commercial Growth.
Travel: Frequent regional travel required.
About The Role
Are you an expert in trade marketing and distribution with a knack for designing smart Route-to-Market strategies At GTI, you'll lead the charge in expanding our market reach and elevating brand visibility across diverse channels. Your deep commercial insight and hands-on approach will ensure our products are available, visible, and competitively positioned in each market.
Route-to-Market
What You Will Do:
- Assess, design, and implement Route to Market (RTM) strategies tailored to each market's regulatory, commercial, and logistical context.
- Analyze and optimize existing distributor setups, suggesting alternative coverage models when needed.
- Identify white space and design commercial approaches to expand GTI's availability and reach.
- Lead market visits and trade audits to validate distributor execution and provide structured feedback.
Trade Marketing & Visibility
- Build and deploy GTI's Trade Marketing Toolkit across priority markets covering product visibility, shelf standards, and brand guidelines.
- Collaborate with distributors and internal teams to align on channel-specific execution plans, including merchandising, POSM deployment, and campaign activations.
- Conduct regular in field audits to monitor compliance with GTI's merchandising and planogram guidelines.
- Define visibility metrics per channel and track them against target execution KPIs.
Pricing, Trade Support & Commercial Control
- Design and manage price structures that captures the value chain while respecting trade margins and tax frameworks
- Monitor price compliance across markets and flag deviation risks.
- Develop, roll out, and evaluate trade support programs (e.g., incentive schemes, rebates, activations) in collaboration with Distributors.
- Support annual distributor negotiations and define execution clauses for new partnerships.
Distribution KPIs & Performance Tracking
- Define and track in-market distribution KPIs, including:
- Product availability.
- Visibility standards.
- Route-to-market coverage.
- Trade support deployment.
- Stock coverage & freshness.
- Build reporting templates with support from the Demand Analyst to review monthly performance per market/distributor.
- Monitor competitor presence, pricing, and activities using structured retail intelligence and distributor feedback.
Forecasting Support & Cross-functional Collaboration
- Collaborate with the Demand Planning Analyst to feed market-level intelligence and performance insights into forecast assumptions.
- Contribute to the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) cycle by validating distributor pipeline, promotional plans, and field realities.
- Align with Supply Chain, Sales, and Finance to maintain visibility across execution, inventory, and cost management.
- Participate in the development of new market entry plans, advising on trade set-up, coverage potential, and resource needs.
Required Skills To Be Successful
- Deep understanding of trade marketing execution and distribution frameworks, ideally across multiple emerging markets and Duty Free channel.
- Strong commercial acumen with experience designing pricing structures and managing trade spend.
- Proven ability to develop and enforce price compliance and execution standards.
- Capable of building KPIs and measuring trade performance through dashboards and field insights.
- Hands-on approach with the ability to work across structured and unstructured distributor environments.
- Excellent communication, negotiation, and relationship-building skills.
What We're Looking For
- 7+ years in Trade Marketing, Distribution Management, or RTM execution tobacco industry experience preferred.
- Strong commercial acumen with proven pricing and trade spend management skills.
- Ability to enforce price compliance and trade execution standards.
- Expertise in KPI development and trade performance measurement.
- Hands-on, proactive approach in distributor environments, structured and unstructured.
- Excellent communication, negotiation, and relationship management skills.
- Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, or Commercial Management.
- Fluent English; additional languages a plus.
