BAT FAQ

Pros

Fantastic benefits package, welcoming culture, given plenty of autonomy

Cons

Workload can be overwhelming at times. Prior work life balance that used to be a “pro” is fading.

Pros

Treats employees well (I was given lots of free things like ipads, pc, etc). Lots of off-site meetings. Competitive salary. Good office (pooltable, video games, cool smoking room, free beer server) Team was run more like an agency than client which has good and bad points. Get to work with some of the best AD agencies in the tob. industry. Large budgets and get to do what you want if proposal is good enough. You have a large sense of leadership and can lead projects as you like if there is a business need. Support for conference or self-training (all managers also need to pass Harvard business manager course). Less stress on sales, more focus on activation leads to less pressure in sales performance. If you are young its nice as you can do lots of business related drinking parties, team spirit can be built nicely. glo is growing share in the marketing, strong #2 contender. Very inclusive company (LGBTQ+, Female friendly)

Cons

Marketing team is silo'd from most of other teams. Structure of marketing team is confusing, half my teams tasks split to another team for no reason and cannot take them back. Lots of office politics and infighting behind the scenes. Round-robin style environment leading you to switch your position or brand very suddenly without warning. Some bottom-feeders that are not passionate in their work and jump in to take credit. Disconnect between upper management and middle management (not transparent in actions, leading to unclear goals). My manager was very much absent, leaving a lot of execution level work to just me. Work life balance was a bit bad. High level workload with sink or swim mentality. Promises from interviewing stages never kept after being hired (get it in writing in your contract). FMC tob. is boring and lifeless in terms of marketing, don't hire into this roll and let it die already or relegate marketing to the sales teams.

Advice to Management

Growth in the wrong places, focus more on executional level marketing resources rather than activation. Take your office politics out and understand this level of mismanagement will not allow anyone to stay long in the office. Keep hiring international members that are bilingual.

Pros

benefits are great, flexi, medical

Cons

some of the leaders dosen't have a clear direction

Pros

great benefits (pension, yearly bonus quite consistent up to 20% from the annual salary based on performance, private medical cover) nice people to work with and general good atmosphere the workload can be big at some points depending on the market you work on

Cons

the base salary is lower than other companies harder to grow/develop once you reach a senior role

Advice to Management

creating opportunities

Pros

Decent salary and non financial benefits.

Cons

Corporate political culture. You don’t need to know your work or work hard, you need to have good connections in order to succeed there. As the business itself doesn’t demand deep knowledge or discipline (at the end people need a good quality smoke at the good price and not fancy pack, new visual or new logo of the brand), hence marketing functions are really just about chitchat and connections, a lot of unnecessary meetings creating “visibility of work”, plenty of failed launches due to same approach. People are moved every couple of years, so they are not interested in creating something solid, they just need to show that they “worked” - launched something (be it a failed SKU or campaign that didn’t bring any new customers) in order to be moved further. Managers are not interested to grew new talents. No respect towards employees. No support for working mothers, in fact a lot of cases when women on maternity leave or that just returned from it were redundant. Poor work life balance. The list is endless, really.

Advice to Management

Stop reorganize the company every year. It doesn’t do good, people are not focus on work or customers, they just focus on surviving in constantly changing structure.