Suzanne Besson

Background

About Suzanne Besson

In January 2018 I returned to SGK as Business Development Director. SGK is a leading global brand development, activation and deployment provider that drives brand performance. By creating brands, helping sell brands, producing brand assets and protecting brand equities, we help our clients achieve higher brand performance. I am responsible for growing sales through new and existing business in EMEA. Prior to the move back to SGK, I lead the Print Deployment team at Imperial Tobacco where I was employed for 6 years. I was responsible for a team of 22 print specialists who were managing packaging launches or changes per year. The team span 4 location hubs – Nottingham, Madrid, Paris and Hamburg. At the start of my career, I spent 14 years at Schawk, part of the SGK group. During this time I undertook a number of different roles, mainly in Account Management, managing product launches and changes and initiating organic sales growth by cross selling additional creative services above the contracted packaging artwork and pre-press. Most of my years in Schawk were spent within on-site client based roles: I spent 8 years at Molson Coors and 2 years at Nestle Purina. This gave me valuable insight into these organisations and allowed me to develop trust and strong relationships with all stakeholders. This was of benefit in my transition to the client based position at Imperial Tobacco where I managed the most challenging project of my career – a compliance led change that was 3 years from planning to launch, involved high degrees of change management, creative resourcing to introduce a “special task force” (via an outsourced model), legal and technical translations, supplier negotiation/management and a £34m budget.