Category Specialist: Pop Culture: Global Fmcg Brand

We have an exciting in-office opportunity for an energetic, Junior-Mid Category Specialist at a renowned global FMCG pop culture brand in Cape Town.

The Brand’s goal is to be known as the thought leader when it comes to all topics Category and Shopper. As Category Specialist, you will play an integral role in building, developing, and maintaining credible, long-term, category lead relationships with the Brand’s retail partners. You will work with the National Account Sales Team to leverage category insights and identify strategic opportunities for the sales team to grow sales and market share, as well as drive total sales growth in this category. In doing so the Category Specialist will need to analyse retail sales and shopper data to uncover actionable insights based on data.

**Responsibilities**:
Category Project Management
- Manage the rollout of category projects in retailers; ensuring a smooth installation rollout to maintenance management post installation to ensure that the unit remains premium in store
- Support Category Manager with sign-off of further category project rollouts into store through strong sales and shopper data analyses supporting reason for rollout
- Category project analyses to track performance of projects utilising Nielsen offtake sales data, Shopper data and internal Cooler door opening data. To be updated monthly and shared with retailers along with their performance scorecard.

In-Store Sales Drivers
- Turn insights into action for the field sales team by identifying key opportunities for the brand and educating the team on how to capitalise on these opportunities
- Training of field sales teams quarterly on importance of category and shopper, key merchandising principles, planograms, and latest category opportunities
- Creation of insights support on category opportunities to help field team execute in trade
- Insights support in the form of a one-pager that helps sell in shelf space allocation of category and Brand, new item listings, disruptive display placements, additionally cooler placements and identified category opportunities.

Category Expertise
- Support category team in managing and planning the annual shopper category Summit; an event in where we invite all our key gas and retail decision makers to give them the competitive edge through understanding the latest shopper and retail trends presented by influential speakers
- Training of retailer’s broader teams on Category management through training days to further position the brand as the category & shopper experts
- Through analysis and the study of multiple data sources, develop an unassailable level of energy category insight
- Utilise and understand Nielsen Offtake data, Household Panel, market demographics, shopper insights, customer point-of-sale and loyalty data used to generate the information for category reviews
- Support Category Manager in regular category reviews, plans and strategies with retail partners
- Provide insights on the Brand’s Category shopper using shopper study data, performance of the category and retailer in comparison to rest of retail using Nielsen Offtake data
- Assortment optimisation & Effective Planogramming through JDA platform
- Merchandising effectiveness
- Current category project success and tracking
- Identify further category growth opportunities to sell into retailers to accelerate growth of category.

**Requirements**:

- University qualification - Bachelor’s Degree
- Minimum 3-5 years’ experience in Category, Insights analyses or Key Account sales in the FMCG industry
- This highly analytical, organised, and self-motivated individual must have the ability to draw insights from multiple complex data sources
- Excellent analytical skills are needed not only to evaluate, but to provide useful, actionable tools that are clear, meaningful, and delivered in a timely manner
- Experience working with syndicated data (Nielsen & IRI), Nielsen Panel (home scan) and shopper metrics
- Customer facing experience a must; travels up to 20% of the time working with retailers
- Familiar with Planogram software, such as JDA - is an asset
- Highly proficient in Microsoft Office, especially Excel and PowerPoint
- In-depth knowledge of the FMCG industry and South African Retail Industry
- Strong project management and planning competencies
- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills are required to express analytics and deliver presentations to various levels in the organisation.

City: Cape Town

Country: South Africa

Level of Expertise: Junior-Mid

Remuneration: Negotiable

Reference Number: #Kim1033

**Viv Gordon**:
MD & Consultant