New Ventures Lead - NBA Africa at National Basketball Association (NBA)

Major Responsibility:

• Development of a regional new verticals strategy across multiple verticals to support business growth via retail channels in NBA Africa’s priority markets.
• Identify regional partners to develop African brand extension programs for NBA Africa.
• Negotiate brand extension categories, product selection, minimum guarantees, royalty rates, payment terms, and territory with licensees, to achieve strong margins and competitive price points at retail.
• Ensure that extension programme resonates with fans by extrapolating key values and themes from the NBA brand and its programming and translating that into extensions by clearly articulating program requirements to partners.
• Negotiate and approve products, merchandise, and promotional deals and items, while overseeing all aspects of business terms from inception to end of the contract term
• Help to develop & execute NBA brand extension concepts inside retail locations and including concept shops/ stores or eCommerce sites.
• Build and manage brand extensions as part of new and renewed Marketing Partnership agreements in conjunction with the NBA Africa and BAL MP teams.
• Manage partners through the product development cycle - from the development of creative briefs, and obtaining legal clearances, to final execution and production.
• Build forecasts by region and category

Required Skills/Knowledge:

• 10+ Years of relevant work experience in the retail space
• Requires experience and a proven track record in building new brand and FMCG lines
• Needs to have led significant strategic projects from launch phase through to execution and thereafter to continued growth and performance targets.
• Proven negotiation skills.
• Possesses a highly innovative business development mindset with a win-win approach to Brand building
• Has demonstrated strong results at building internal influence and followership throughout their past organizations which can also be accomplished within our Matrixed organization of NBA Africa, BAL and through key Global based colleagues

Educational Background Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, or a related discipline