Springfield, Illinois – BRANDT, a leading agriculture retailer and manufacturer of specialty agriculture products, has added a senior executive to launch a global product management function. Brian Deverman, most recently with Bayer CropScience, will join the BRANDT Marketing team as Global Senior Product Director to design, launch and build the new capability.
“We’re thrilled to have Brian join us,” said Karl Barnhart, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer. “Brian will bring focus, leadership and -- most importantly — strategic thinking to this new function. He’s been a long-time friend of the company and we couldn’t be more pleased to finally have him on Team BRANDT.”
The product management function will be based in Springfield, IL but will have a global mandate.
“We’re looking at product management to sit at the intersection of marketing, sales and discovery and innovation. Brian’s role will be to bring these teams together to rationalize our product portfolio, position our products in unique spaces and help create consistent product stories,” explained Barnhart.
Deverman joins BRANDT after a diverse career that includes three stints at Bayer/Monsanto spanning ten years. Most recently, he was VP, Global Business Development and Licensing Lead. In that role, he managed a large portfolio of initiatives and was responsible for leading account relationships in new and novel biofuel feedstocks for low carbon fuel alternatives. Deverman has also worked at the marketing agency Osborn Barr Paramore and the seed company Dupont Pioneer, amongst others.
“I grew up 15 miles from BRANDT’s Illinois headquarters and our family worked with BRANDT’s retail group for years,” said Deverman. “So when this opportunity came up, it was the perfect match. It aligned with my skill set and put me into an environment that I’ve known since I was literally old enough to drive a tractor.”
Alex Lovdahl, BRANDT Marketing Director, Insights & Analytics, will immediately join the product management team. Lovdahl has built a powerful suite of analytic tools to provide much-needed visibility across the organization and put BRANDT’s high value agronomic solutions into the competitive context.
“Brian’s charge is to build a data-driven function leveraging what Alex has been doing,” said Barnhart. “We’ve been hugely impressed with what Alex has built and we’re already seeing significant adoption throughout the organization. But the real magic will happen when we integrate the data analytics capabilities into the product management function. I’m really excited about what the future holds.”
For more information, visit www.brandt.co.