My first job: Product Specialist at Reckitt Benckiser

My first job was Product Specialist at Reckitt Benckiser Group, from January to June 2017. My main work was on Dettol. I helped improve its packaging with sustainability principles, and I worked on marketing strategies to grow sales. Six months is a short time, but a consumer goods company teaches a new graduate fast.

Where I came from

I studied Economics and Management at Brunel University London, from 2013 to 2016. In 2016 I started an MSc in Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Design, also at Brunel. So I came to Reckitt with theory about markets and theory about sustainable design. At Reckitt I saw both meet a product that people buy every day.

A pack is a decision with many owners

On paper, a packaging change looks like a design task. In a consumer goods company, it touches almost every team. Marketing cares about how the pack looks on the shelf. Sales cares about what retailers will accept. Supply and production care about cost and what the line can run.

Sustainability adds one more question to each of these. Can we use less material? Can the customer recycle the pack? Does the change still protect the product?

My lesson: a good idea is only the start. You must explain it in the language of each team that owns a part of the decision.

The customer decides in seconds

Dettol is a brand that people trust. That trust lives on the pack. A shopper looks at a shelf for a few seconds and then picks one product.

So every change has a risk. If you make the pack greener but the shopper does not recognise it, you lose the sale. Sustainability work in a consumer brand must keep the brand clear. The shopper must still see the product they trust.

This taught me to test each idea against what real customers do.

Marketing is arithmetic too

The second half of my role was marketing strategy to grow sales. As an economics graduate, I expected marketing to be mostly creative work. It is creative, but it is also numbers. Which product sells where? Which promotion brings new buyers, and which one only moves sales from next month to this month?

A large company measures these things with care. I learned to ask first what a plan will change in the numbers.

What I took with me

My time at Reckitt was short. In June 2017 I moved to the Central Bank of Oman for economics research. Later I joined EY, and in 2019 I took on BHD Group as founder and CEO.

At BHD Printing and Designing, we now make packaging for other companies. The questions from my first job come back in a new form. Will the customer recognise the brand? Can the factory produce it at the right cost? Can we use less material? I first learned to ask them on a Dettol pack.

For a new graduate, I recommend a first job in a company that sells to the public. You learn that every product decision has a customer at the end. You also learn to work with many teams before a single change reaches the shelf.