Brandon Taylor

6:30 AM
My alarm goes off, I might hit snooze once but by 6:45 am I’m out of bed. I shower, get ready and pack my stuff together.

7:30 AM
I drive to work. Luckily, we have free parking on-site, so this is an option for me.

8:00 AM
I arrive at work, usually one of the first people in the office. We have flexible working hours, so often I will arrive half an hour early and leave earlier in the afternoon.

I check my emails, as often there can be 15-20 emails in my inbox sent after close of business the previous day. These are often from global Sanofi teams, who I work with on projects such as new product launches.

8:15 AM
I refresh the fortnightly sales products to track how our products are performing in the market and send these out to the brand managers and head of marketing.

I do this using software on Microsoft Excel – it doesn’t take a lot of analytical skills; however I need the skills to interpret the data and identify any significant trends or unusual activity. I put together a summary to present to the team later today.

8:50 AM
I head downstairs to our on-site café and get a soy cappuccino – always remembering to take my keep-cup as it’s better for the environment and we also get a small discount for using reusable cups.

9:00 AM
It’s time for the marketing team to come together for our weekly WIP (work in progress) meeting. We chat about how our weekends were, before listing our top three priorities for the rest of the week.

For me, my top priorities involve finalising packaging artwork for a new product launch, helping the sales team prepare for a meeting with a key customer tomorrow, and watching the live-stream for a focus group later in the week (this will be key market research for one of our brands).

In the meeting, we also present our summaries of the latest sales data, with a focus on market share and sales trends. We then brainstorm together to identify ways to increase the market share of our products and put them into our priorities if we come up with anything new.

10:00 AM
I meet with representatives from the medical and regulatory teams and hold a workshop with them about the packaging artwork for our new product launch.

It’s important that these different departments are involved, as they need to sign off on the artwork before it can be approved, and they also bring unique expertise to the process.

With the medical team, we have a look through the claims that we have on the packaging and go through a few clinical studies to identify how we can make the claims stronger and find any other claims we can make.

With the regulatory team, we explore ways to make the artwork as appealing as possible to consumers and shoppers while still being compliant with the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Association), the external agency who need to approve the packaging before the product can be in stores.

Outputs are a revision of the artwork that we sent to our design agency to have it properly mocked up with the exact measurements.

11:00 AM
I work at my desk to put together the slide deck for the sales team. This is mainly key information about the brands I work across; it covers who their consumers are, what the key products are in the range, and what our media activity is for these brands.

I can grab most of this information from previous presentations and from my own knowledge of working on the brands. I ask my manager (the senior brand manager) for help if I don’t know any specifics.

I send it through to my manager and they will provide any final edits or builds before I can then send it through to the sales team. They will use it to help give background to our brands in a meeting with a key customer.

12:00 PM
I head to lunch, usually grabbing a sandwich or soup from a café in a nearby building. I eat in our building’s café area or in our outdoor seating area with some of the other graduates, but sometimes if I have a deadline later that day, I will have a quick lunch at my desk while reading the news or watching a short video on YouTube.

12:30 PM
I have a weekly call with my team and with our creative agency who are based in Brisbane. We currently have advertisements that are live for our brands, so they run us through the latest figures around how they are tracking in terms of spend, audience engagement and effect on sales.

We provide feedback and explore whether any modifications can be made to the campaign before it ends and what learnings we can take away and use for our next campaign.

1:00 PM
I meet with our employee resource group for LGBT+ inclusion – a group made up of individuals from across four cities in Australia and New Zealand, and in all different parts of the business.

We discuss the initiatives we have planned for the group and divide up some tasks. Some of us will work towards planning an event for R U OK Day, while some of us will work on planning out our internal and external communications about the group.

A few of us are going to a LGBT+ networking event with other pharmaceutical businesses, so we discuss what we are aiming to learn from it.  Aas a relatively new group we just want to see what more established groups have done and use it as best practice for us.

1:30 PM
I have a project meeting for the new product launch for which I’m creating the new packaging artwork. I join some team members in a meeting room and use Zoom to call those on the project team who are in our Brisbane and Auckland offices.

The project manager runs through the month’s actions and checks in with each team member to see how they are tracking. I report back with the status of where the artwork currently is, and we commit to actions for the next meeting in a month to make sure we are on track for a launch next year.

2:00 PM
I have some time to work on a small project for one of our brand websites. This involves creating new articles and other content based on high-performing keywords we have identified. I do some research on Google and Google Scholar to find articles and studies to use as references in my article and then begin writing it.

Once I’ve completed it by the end of the week, I will need to work with the medical and regulatory teams to make sure that all the information is correct and approve it. I will then work with the digital lead to get it published live on our website.

3:00 PM
I have a workshop for this week’s market research focus group. With the consumer insights team and market research agency, we brainstorm the questions that we want to ask our focus group and try to make them as relevant and strategic as possible.

I have some outputs from the meeting – to create stimuli for the focus group attendees (in the form of product information cards, flash cards and other visuals).

4:00 PM
It’s been a long and full day, so I catch up on some admin before I get ready to go home. I have some purchase orders that I need to submit, and some emails from earlier in the day that I need to reply to. Once I’m done I write my to-do list for the next day.

4:30 PM
I drive home, stopping by the gym on the way back. I grab dinner with a friend, and wind down by watching some Netflix before bed. I try to be asleep by 11:30 every night. I’m happy that I get to sleep in the next day, since I work from home two days a week.