Sr. Director of Category Management and Insights

Senior Director, Category Management & Insights

The Senior Director, Category Management & Insights a key enterprise leader responsible for Shearer’s category thought leadership, developing category strategies based on data and insights, and customer-centric category leadership across the North American business. As a senior leader in the organization, this individual must assist in driving strong cross-functional collaboration to build strong partnerships with all Shearer’s customers through best practices in insights and category leadership. This role leads and develops a high-performing team who support multiple product categories, customers, and channels.

This leader connects consumer insights, shopper behavior, category strategy, and merchandising execution to enable Sales effectiveness and Executive planning. Utilizing consumer and shopper insights, this leader will develop innovative solutions to deliver mutually beneficial business growth through strategy development, assortment recommendations, new item presentation, category business reviews, and all aspects of shelving and organizing products in a category friendly way online and offline.

Your seat at the table

• Establish Shearer’s as a best-in-class category partner, grounded in consumer, shopper, and marketplace understanding. Informed by consumer trends, competitive dynamics, whitespace opportunities, and customer needs.
• Establish category management defining strategies to provide the framework for customer/account specific plans focused against merchandising, product assortment, placement, pricing, and promotion online and offline
• Serve as the category expert internally, creating compelling, actionable & measurable category plans and working collaboratively with cross-functional teams including sales, strategy, shopper marketing, and insights
• Develop and present comprehensive, concise, and objective category reviews incorporating shopper, consumer, retailer, syndicated and loyalty data
• Maintain tracking and reporting of company and customer assortments to monitor progress against goals, identify incremental opportunities to drive the business
• Present insights and provide strategic point of view at customer, internal, and executive meetings as well as ad hoc discussions as applicable
• Develop long-term partnership with customers through tactical and strategic customer engagement, including senior level
• Collaborate with customer team to expand category leadership in omnichannel and digital solutions
• Bring intellectual curiosity and a forward-thinking mentality to maintain awareness of market trends and competitor strategies and adjust Shearer’s strategy accordingly
• Participates in the development of best practices in Category Management, and pursues the knowledge needed to improve departmental capabilities and professional agility

What you bring to the table

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Management, Finance, Accounting, Data Analytics, or related field
• A minimum of 7-10 years of progressive sales, category management, trade marketing, analytics, consumer or shopper insights experience within CPG
• Proven experience leading customer engagements in both space and assortment, pricing strategy, trade promotion strategy, and omnichannel solutions, building indispensable, collaborative partnerships with retail customers
• Ability to develop and deliver a strategic plan, measuring and monitoring results, and make recommendations to achieve growth targets through category leadership
• Ability to present and calibrate critical challenges at the executive level
• Previous sales experience is preferred
• Expertise in the Category Management process and proficient in syndicated and panel data as well as familiarity with pricing, promotion and assortment optimization software knowledge and experience working with customer POS data systems (experience with data sources such as Nielsen, IRI, NPD, Numerator, dunnhumby, Spectra/demographics)
• Advanced Microsoft Office Suite skills (Excel, Word and PowerPoint)
• Strong planning/organizing skills; the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously and create structure and process where it does not currently exist
• Strong understanding of industry and national category management and shopper insight trends, frameworks and best practices
• Extensive knowledge of retail merchandising and in store execution tactics