POSITION OVERVIEW
The Coca-Cola Category team is seeking a highly skilled advisor to join our category team. This role is integral to our category management team, supporting Beverage merchants on the Walmart account. As a Category Leadership advisor, you will leverage your strong technical skills, customer relationships, people leadership, and strategic thinking to develop strategies alongside the merchants to optimize space and assortment. You will manage and improve an annual assortment optimization process side-by-side with the merchants to drive category growth.
Role is located in Rogers, Arkansas and will report to the Senior Director, Category Leadership, Walmart & Sam’s Club.
Position Responsibilities
- Serve as the primary point of contact for Walmart merchant, understanding their needs, both tactical and strategic, to deliver tailored and custom solutions and strategies.
- Partners with Walmart on key Category strategy, assortment, and space decisions including working with senior executives to collaboratively build strategies and tactics designed for future category growth.
- Makes strategic and tactical recommendations to drive future category, retailer, and Coca-Cola growth by leveraging unique insights from point of sale, shopper card, panel data as well as other industry sources.
- Builds strong connection between Walmart and Coca-Cola’s strategic priorities.
- Owns end-to-end modular relay process for store specific modulars.
- Stewards’ development & implementation of process for sharing best practices within Coca-Cola to drive/shape future corporate strategy.
- Develop fact-based insights to develop assortment strategies for merchant; combine insights from various sources to build a cohesive recommendation for the merchant’s assortment
- Ensures that category management tools, data, and shopper insights are effectively leveraged to grow distribution, space, and optimized assortment for all beverage categories.
KEY FOCUS AREAS
Strategic Thinking and Strategy Development:
- Drive category strategy and opportunities; and ensure the plan has a relevant category strategy which will win in the market.
- Focus on Walmart category development.
- Provide leadership & continued stewardship for Walmart’s beverage categories.
- Recommends space opportunities and risks for the beverage category.
Project Management:
- Collaborate with cross functional departments (Channel Strategy, Marketing, RGM etc) on projects focused on becoming our customers most valued supplier.
Relationship Management:
- Develop solid working relationships with key retailer divisional/category managers to drive NARTD beverages into all aspects of their shopper engagement strategy in-store.
- Act as brand champion for Coca-Cola by defining and driving overall brand objectives through the practice of category management techniques, delivering comprehensive category programs internally and across retail partners to drive product and brand initiatives.
- Build strong team-oriented relationships with other key internal business units and/or global partners that result in new business and/or cross-category opportunities.
Education: Minimum Required Bachelor’s Degree; Preferred: MBA or other graduate degree.
EXPERIENCE
Minimum Required:
- 5+ Years in CPG Industry.
- Senior level experience within the consumer goods/beverages industry.
- Strong knowledge of category management principles and analytic techniques.
Preferred Level:
- 7+ Years in CPG Industry.
- Experience across multiple disciplines beyond category management (Shopper Insights, Strategy and Capabilities, etc).
SKILLS
- Advanced analytical capability.
- Specific capabilities with customer specific data sources (Walmart Luminate/Scintilla, Retail Link, etc.).
- High level of experience in data providers (Nielsen, IRI).
- Collect, clean, aggregate, combine and maintain data to ensure accuracy and reliability for analysis and reporting; Including from data sources like Nielsen, Circana, and Numerator.
- High technical skill and aptitude with modular drawing process tools such as:
- JDA, Mission Control, Shelf IQ.
- High level of technical skills in computer software: MS Office, Power BI, Alteryx, Tableau,.
- Demonstrated reputation for customer engagement with ability to positively drive business results
- Ability to link category leadership strategies to customer strategies.
- Strong analytical and problem solving skills with the ability to interpret complex data and translate it into actional insights.
- Planning experience – strategic thinking, forward looking, time cognizant.
- Drives organizational performance, efficiency, & effectiveness by translating analytics into actions and results.