The National Basketball Association (NBA) is an elite professional sports league and a preeminent global media and entertainment company. Headquartered in New York City, the NBA strives to represent its 30 teams at a level that maximizes the growth, financial success, and popularity of the game of basketball. The NBA has evolved into one of the world's largest and most successful sports, media, and entertainment businesses, based on cutting-edge thinking, expert brand marketing, creative merchandising, and exclusive partnerships. The league is focused on increasing its global fan base by growing the game of basketball and creating new opportunities for fans across Africa to engage with the NBA.
The NBA reaches fans and consumers worldwide through the broadcast, licensing, and marketing of consumer products bearing the league's trademarks and player attributes as well as more than 300 licensees manufacture, sell and market NBA-branded products that are promoted worldwide and sold in more than 125, 000 retail locations in 100 countries on six continents. The NBA believes there is a significant opportunity to build and grow the NBA enterprise in Africa through television, digital, mobile merchandising, and event activations through innovative partnerships that extend the NBA brand into new verticals such as lifestyle, fashion, and health & wellness, and food & beverages.
The New Ventures Director is responsible for researching, creating, maintaining, and growing the brand extension programs for NBA Africa. The individual needs strong strategic, negotiating & sales skills to bring in profitable brand extensions tailored to meet specific objectives, all while addressing the league goals. The Director of New Ventures is responsible for forecasting, managing, and meeting set profit goals.
Major Responsibility:
- Development of a regional new verticals strategy across multiple verticals to support business growth via retail channels in NBA Africas 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
- 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
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Marketing, or a related discipline
