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Head of DX Germ Protection

Reckitt

Slough, UK

Posted on Jul 11, 2025

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We are Reckitt

Home to the world's best loved and trusted hygiene, health, and nutrition brands. Our purpose defines why we exist: to protect, heal and nurture in the relentless pursuit of a cleaner, healthier world. We are a global team united by this purpose. Join us in our fight to make access to the highest quality hygiene, wellness, and nourishment a right and not a privilege.

Marketing Excellence

Marketing is at the heart of Reckitt. We pride ourselves on our unique way of driving growth for some of the world's most loved and trusted health, hygiene and nutrition brands. Our purpose and fight are what motivates us to design and deliver distinctive communications throughout our consumer funnel, so that we deliver category growth as well as a positive impact on society. With extensive media and digital teams embedded throughout the organisation, we measure both our business and our societal impact. Our global teams lead on our overarching brand strategy, brand guardianship and innovation pipeline in close partnership with R&D. Leaving our local marketing teams to deliver on our regional goals in partnership with our Sales teams. With the scale of our 2500 marketing community - alongside our leading-edge Marketing Academy - your opportunities to grow and upskill will be extensive.

About the role

The Head of Design Excellence – Germ Protection is a newly scoped strategic leadership role, introduced as part of Reckitt’s transformation to elevate design’s impact on business performance.

Operating at a category-wide, portfolio level, this role defines and leads the design strategy for all relevant category brands and mapped brands. It is non-hands-on in nature, with a focus on enabling and governing high-impact brand experiences through strategic frameworks, senior team leadership, and commercial influence.

Candidates must demonstrate a proven history of building high-performing teams, shaping global brand identity systems, leading self-initiated innovation pipelines, and embedding design as a growth lever across business functions and geographies.

Your responsibilities

1. Capability Building & Team Leadership

Build and lead a high-performing team of Senior Design Excellence Managers and in-house creatives across multiple brands.

Implement performance frameworks, development plans, and coaching programmes linked to commercial KPIs.

Champion a culture of creativity, accountability, and measurable impact within the team.

Demonstrate a track record of developing senior talent and scaling design leadership across geographies.

2. Strategic Brand Governance & Identity Foundations

Define and govern the brand identity foundations for all category brands — going beyond packaging to include digital, experiential, and service-led touchpoints.

Develop systems that guide brand purpose, tone of voice, visual expression, and global-to-local activation.

Lead implementation across global and regional design teams, ensuring consistency and local relevance across markets.

Demonstrate expertise in shaping multi-brand frameworks that are scalable, future-facing, and commercially sound.

3. Consumer-Led Innovation

Drive self-initiated, design-led innovation workstreams that shape the future of the category beyond briefed projects.

Translate insight, foresight, and behavioural trends into opportunity spaces for design-driven business growth.

Partner with Innovation, R&D, and Marketing to embed design upstream in the innovation pipeline.

Identify whitespace opportunities in materials, formats, services, and sustainability that unlock long-term consumer and commercial value.

4. Cross-Functional & Commercial Leadership

Serve as a strategic partner to GEC-1, influencing business strategy through design thinking.

Lead cross-functional visioning and workshop sessions to embed design into broader business planning.

Collaborate with functions including Innovation, R&D, Marketing, and Commercial to align brand experience with strategic priorities.

5. Design Strategy & Category Vision

Set the long-term design vision for the category ensuring design is distinctive, desirable, and fit for future growth.

Guide the category’s transition from asset delivery to experience leadership — focusing on systems, not just outputs.

Integrate sustainability, accessibility, technology, and emerging design methods into the category strategy.

Lead design strategy across multiple markets, brands, and stakeholder groups.

The experience we're looking for

Experience & Qualifications

Extensive experience in Global design leadership roles, with a strong track record in multi-brand, cross-market environments.

Demonstrated success in:

Managing senior design leaders across multiple brands, scaling team culture and talent development.

Governing global brand identity systems across touchpoints.

Leading proactive, insight-led innovation pipelines.

Influencing executive stakeholders and linking design to growth metrics.

Experience within FMCG or similar fast-paced consumer-centric industries preferred.

Skills

Capability Building: Ability to develop high-performance creative teams linked to commercial outcomes.

Brand Governance: Expert in identity systems beyond packaging, including digital and experiential consistency.

Strategic Innovation: Skilled in initiating and leading insight-driven innovation across product and experience.

Commercial Influence: Proven at aligning design activity with category growth KPIs and GEC-1 engagement.

Cross-Functional Partnership: Effective at embedding design into business planning and cross-functional roadmaps.

Mindset & Leadership Approach

Consumer-Centric & Insight-Led: Driven by deep understanding of human needs, behaviours, and expectations.

Strategic & Visionary: Comfortable leading at category level and setting future-facing design strategies.

Collaborative & Credible: Builds trusted partnerships across disciplines, functions, and seniority levels.

The skills for success

Brand Strategy, Presentation skills, Drive Innovation, Storytelling, Creativity, Digital Marketing, Commercial accumen, Collaboration, FMCG/Consumer Health Experience.

What we offer

With inclusion at the heart of everything we do, working alongside our four global Employee Resource Groups, we support our people at every step of their career journey, helping them to succeed in their own individual way. We invest in the wellbeing of our people through parental benefits, an Employee Assistance Program to promote mental health, and life insurance for all employees globally. We have a range of other benefits in line with the local market. Through our global share plans we offer the opportunity to save and share in Reckitt's potential future successes. For eligible roles, we also offer short-term incentives to recognise, appreciate and reward your work for delivering outstanding results. You will be rewarded in line with Reckitt's pay for performance philosophy.

Equality

We recognise that in real life, great people don't always 'tick all the boxes'. That's why we hire for potential as well as experience. Even if you don't meet every point on the job description, if this role and our company feels like a good fit for you, we still want to hear from you. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, disability or medical condition; colour, ethnicity, race, citizenship, and national origin; religion, faith; pregnancy, family status and caring responsibilities; sexual orientation; sex, gender identity, gender expression, and transgender identity; protected veteran status; size or any other basis protected by appropriate law.