Consumer Communications Manager – Food and Drink

About the team:
You’ll join the Food & Drink PR team within Consumer Communications, part of Corporate Affairs. The team works across fresh and packaged food, non-food grocery, and beers, wines and spirits, helping to show how Sainsbury’s makes good food joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone, every day.
This is a collaborative team with close connections across Marketing, Product Development, Buying, Trading, Insights, Nectar, Social Media, Internal Communications and the wider Corporate Affairs function. You’ll also work with external PR and production partners to turn commercial priorities and product stories into relevant, engaging media activity.

More about the role:
As Communications Manager, Food & Drink, you’ll lead PR campaigns and projects from brief through to evaluation. Your work will support priority products and categories, demonstrate innovation and value, and contribute to broader food and drink campaign strategies, including activity linked to propositions such as Nectar Prices and Aldi Price Match.

Day to day, you could be developing a PR plan, drafting press releases, statements, quotes or Q&As, briefing agencies, managing campaign budgets, building relationships with national, broadcast, specialist and consumer media, or delivering a media event or consumer-facing activation. You’ll measure work against agreed KPIs, share results and learning, and make sure activity is joined up across relevant channels. You’ll line manage the Food & Drink Communications Executive, support the Senior Communications Manager on larger campaigns, and take part in the out-of-hours press office rota. The role is hybrid, with an expectation of at least two days a week in the London office and additional office attendance when campaigns, events or busy trading periods require it.

More about you:
You’ll bring practical consumer PR experience and be ready to take ownership of campaigns and projects from the outset. Food and drink experience would be useful, but it is not essential. What matters most is evidence of delivering large-scale PR activity for consumer brands and explaining clearly how your work achieved measurable results across traditional, broadcast and relevant social channels.
You’re comfortable balancing several priorities, managing timelines and budgets, and working with agencies, third-party partners and senior internal stakeholders. You communicate clearly in writing and in person, use sound judgement when priorities change, and can lead others through effective delegation, feedback and appropriately handled challenging conversations. You’ll be curious about media trends and new approaches to PR, while maintaining close attention to detail and a clear focus on outcomes.

Essential criteria:
• Demonstrable consumer PR experience, including end-to-end delivery of PR campaigns for a recognised consumer brand in an in-house or agency environment.
• Proven delivery of media events or consumer-facing activations, with clear responsibility for planning, coordination and evaluation.
• Evidence of successfully delivering PR campaigns that achieve target outcomes, reinforce key messages and produce measurable results against agreed campaign objectives.
• Demonstrable experience of managing campaign timelines, budgets, agencies or third-party partners, and multiple internal stakeholders
• Proven leadership skills – ability to lead cross-functional projects, coordinating stakeholders, managing risks and priorities, and delivering successful outcomes within agreed timelines and budgets.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 10% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.