Vice President, Consumer Insights & Marketing Intelligence

Company Description

International Dairy Queen, Inc. (IDQ), based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the parent company of American Dairy Queen Corporation and Dairy Queen Canada, Inc. Through its subsidiaries, IDQ develops, licenses, and services a system of more than 7,800 DQ restaurants in more than 20 countries. IDQ is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. For more information, visit DairyQueen.com. Here at IDQ, we create extraordinary Fan experiences every day and we do this through our commitment to hiring and retaining only the best in class talent. We firmly believe that our employees are the catalyst to the success of the company where their initiative, strategic thinking, and entrepreneurial spirit are recognized and rewarded. We're looking for motivated, passionate and dedicated individuals with an inherent need and ambition to go after bigger challenges.

Job Overview

The Vice President, Consumer Insights & Marketing Intelligence, serves as Dairy Queen’s authority on consumer brands, the marketplace, and marketing effectiveness. This leader drives a deep understanding of consumer behavior and market dynamics, translating insights into strategies and recommendations that accelerate brand growth and business performance. As a trusted advisor to senior leadership, the Vice President establishes the vision, capabilities, and roadmap for Consumer Insights and Marketing Intelligence, ensuring consumer and competitive perspectives are embedded in key decisions. The role connects consumer research, brand health, marketing effectiveness, marketplace intelligence, and business performance to provide actionable foresight and strategic direction. This hands‑on leader personally guides high‑priority research and analytics efforts, develops a high‑performing team, and fosters a culture that converts insights into measurable business results.

Consumer Understanding & Growth Insights

• Serve as the organizational authority on DQ consumers, developing a holistic understanding of their needs, motivations, behaviors, occasions, and decision drivers.
• Identify consumer‑driven opportunities to strengthen the brand and drive short‑and long‑term growth.
• Develop and lead foundational learning agendas focused on areas such as consumer segmentation, target definition, attitudes and behaviors, needs and occasions, customer journeys, brand positioning, and emerging consumer needs.
• Ensure consumer understanding informs annual business and marketing planning as well as longer‑term strategic planning.
• Integrate qualitative, quantitative, behavioral, syndicated, and business information to create a comprehensive perspective rather than relying on individual studies or data sources.
• Establish mechanisms to disseminate and embed foundational consumer learning across the organization, so that knowledge accumulates and is leveraged over time.

Go‑to‑Market Consumer Insights

• Embed consumer understanding throughout Dairy Queen’s go‑to‑market process, partnering with Marketing and cross‑functional teams to influence strategy, consumer propositions, menu and innovation, targeting, positioning, promotions, communications, customer experience, and activation.
• Bring insights into early decisions to shape strategy and deliver research and reporting to validate decisions after they have been made.
• Develop a deep understanding of the consumer journey and the drivers of brand consideration, choice, purchase, and loyalty.
• Partner with Marketing and agency teams to understand what Dairy Queen should say, how it should say it, to whom, and where in the consumer journey communications can have the greatest impact.
• Personally lead or actively contribute to high‑priority and complex consumer learning initiatives from initial business‑question framing through research design, synthesis, recommendation, and activation.

Brand & Marketing Intelligence

• Lead Dairy Queen’s understanding of brand health, equity, salience, consideration, preference, perceptions, competitive positioning, and the drivers of brand growth.
• Establish an integrated approach to understanding how marketing influences consumer perceptions, behavior, and business performance.
• Partner with Marketing and agency teams to continuously improve campaign strategy, creative execution, and overall marketing effectiveness.
• Develop approaches and learning agendas for creative and campaign evaluation, from early strategy and development through in‑market and post‑campaign learning.
• Partner with Business Intelligence & Analytics, Marketing, and other stakeholders to integrate brand and consumer measures with Marketing Mix Modeling, Return on Marketing Spend, media measurement, and business results to develop a holistic perspective on marketing effectiveness.
• Identify and communicate learning across campaigns and initiatives so that Dairy Queen systematically improves its marketing effectiveness over time in addition to evaluating individual programs.

Marketplace Intelligence & Foresight

• Build and maintain an integrated understanding of the restaurant marketplace and the broader forces influencing Dairy Queen consumers.
• Monitor changes in consumer behavior, culture, technology, competition, category dynamics, and the marketing environment to identify emerging growth opportunities and potential threats.
• Establish foresight capabilities that help Dairy Queen distinguish meaningful signals of change from noise and prepare the organization for future consumer and marketplace shifts.
• Translate trends and marketplace intelligence into implications and choices.
• Proactively bring emerging consumer and marketplace opportunities to senior leadership and challenge existing assumptions when the evidence suggests the business should think differently.

Insights Excellence, Innovation & Capability Building

• Establish the strategic roadmap for Consumer Insights & Marketing Intelligence and continually evolve the function to meet the future needs of Dairy Queen.
• Ensure excellence in qualitative and quantitative research design, execution, analysis, interpretation, and storytelling.
• Explore, test, and adopt emerging research methodologies, behavioral approaches, and tech‑enabled capabilities that can create greater speed, depth, or competitive advantage.
• Develop a strategic ecosystem of research, data, technology, and consulting partners, ensuring Dairy Queen leverages their intellectual capabilities as well as their executional resources.
• Create a culture of meta‑learning by connecting findings across research, marketing initiatives, time periods, and data sources to identify patterns and generate new insights.
• Steward organizational understanding of consumer insights and marketing effectiveness, helping business partners become better consumers and evidence and adopting the role.

Enterprise Leadership

• Serve as a trusted strategic advisor to senior leadership and cross‑functional partners, bringing an objective and evidence‑based consumer and marketplace perspective into critical business decisions.
• Maintain direct involvement in high‑priority initiatives by framing business questions, shaping research and analytical approaches, challenging assumptions and methodology, interpreting results, and developing the ultimate business recommendation.
• Reduce complexity in decision‑making by reconciling disparate information and translating large amounts of consumer, marketing, marketplace, and business information into a clear point of view.
• Build strong partnerships across Marketing, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Operations, R&D, and other key functions.
• Effectively navigate and influence within a franchise system, considering the needs of consumers, franchisees, and the enterprise when developing recommendations.
• Build and develop a high‑performing CI+MI team and create an environment characterized by curiosity, intellectual honesty, experimentation, collaboration, and constructive provocation.

The US national base salary range for this position is $220,096 - $275,120. This position is also eligible for a bonus. The base salary range displayed reflects the targeted hiring range for positions across all US locations. Individual pay is determined by job‑related skills, work location and relevant education or experience.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree required in Marketing, Business, Marketing Research, Psychology, Behavioral or Cognitive Science, or a related field.
• Advanced degree or MBA preferred.
• 15+ years of progressive experience in Consumer Insights, Marketing Insights, Marketing Analytics, Strategy, and/or closely related disciplines.
• Minimum of 7+ years of experience leading teams and influencing senior executives.
• Track record of building, developing, and inspiring high‑performance teams.
• Experience in restaurant, retail, consumer packaged goods, or another consumer‑led business; QSR and/or franchise‑system experience is particularly relevant.
• Demonstrated mastery of qualitative and quantitative consumer research, with experience across areas such as segmentation, consumer journey mapping, needs and occasions, positioning, brand health, product or concept development, advertising and creative assessment, and behavioral research.
• Strong understanding of marketing effectiveness, including creative and campaign measurement and the role of media and marketing investment measurement methodologies such as Marketing Mix Modeling and Return on Marketing Spend.
• Demonstrated ability to integrate information across primary research, syndicated sources, behavioral data, marketing analytics, marketplace intelligence, and business performance.
• Strong understanding of research design and analytical principles, with the ability to optimize approaches, interrogate findings, distinguish correlation from causation where relevant.
• Experience identifying and applying emerging research methods, tools, technologies, and approaches to improve insights quality, speed, and business impact.
• Demonstrated success operating in complex, matrixed organizations and influencing decisions through both formal and informal relationships.

Additional Information

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Benefit eligible employees may receive a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical and dental coverage, 401K match, paid time off (including volunteer time as well as parental leave) and so much more! To learn more about our great benefit offerings, Click Here.

Work Environment: Most positions located out of our global headquarters in Bloomington, MN will work a hybrid work schedule where you will work 3 collaboration days a week. Additional in office time may be required to support team/project needs.

Inclusion & Belonging: We are committed to creating a culture of inclusion and belonging for all who touch DQ. We believe in and commit to fostering a community where employees bring their authentic selves to work, and where we recruit, engage, and retain employees, franchise owners, and suppliers based on qualifications and merit. We strive to maintain an environment where everyone feels welcome.

IDQ is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and we use E-Verify to confirm the identity and employment eligibility of all new team members.

You must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship.