Who got that job?

By LIANE VOISEY

Were you one of the 130 people who applied for this job and wondered who got it?

Job title: Marketing manager, Chequer Packaging.

Moving from cereal boxes to potato chip packets is a welcome change for 44-year-old Steve Pinkerton.

His most recent role was sales and marketing manager for Carter Holt Harvey's PaperBoard division, where he worked for two years until the division closed down.

"Being paper and board, the main end-uses of the product were in cartons for cereals etc and large cardboard shipper boxes."

But the role at Chequer involves so much more than boxes. Focusing strongly on the New Zealand and Australian markets, the products use flexible substrates, or plastics, rather than paper and board. Think stand-up pouches for soup and flexible laminates such as potato chip packets for example, he says.

Pinkerton, who has a diploma in business and marketing from Auckland University, says his roles at Carter Holt Harvey and at Australian-based Jac Asia Pacific, where he was group marketing manager for 13 years, were strategic in nature and focused mainly in Southeast Asia, China and Korea.

He has always been enthusiastic about working in packaging.

"It is such a large industry, which involves many aspects from concept and design, through to inks and substrates, film, cardboard etc, but at all times you are focused on the end user."

This, he says, could be as varied as fast-moving consumer goods companies packing breakfast cereal through to courier bags for security companies or industrial applications. And they all require their own form of packaging.

Given his broad experience in the packaging industry Pinkerton hopes to expand Chequer's range beyond the company's predominantly food-based packaging.

The new role, he says, will be responsible for the "whole marketing mix" and he's looking forward to gaining a good understanding of all the possibilities and taking them to the market.