Manager - Category Management and Insights

Org Unit :  SALT

Area of Interest :  Consumer Products

Shift :  N/A

The Manager - Category Management and Insights position will take a lead role developing category, shopper, and channel insights to drive sales for our key customers and the Morton brand. This position will play a key role in integrating research insights into actionable recommendations for customers business plans and presentations. The goal is to understand category dynamics and shopper decision process by category and brand to include shopper/consumer decisions, loyalty, basket, and promotional impact. Responsible for establishing high level relationships with key decision makers at selected customers for all Morton categories, partnering with customer management to drive strategic plans and train key sales personnel on shopper/consumer/category insight development and methodology.

Essential Duties:

Help drive issues-oriented category and shopper insights work, translating broad shopper insights and category knowledge to address retailer opportunities.

Provide thought leadership to the Director, National Accounts on the identification of opportunities and build presenations that effectively translate insights into actionable recommendations.

Collaborate with Category Business Analysts to develop compelling, fact-based presentations and customer reviews for Morton categories.

Develop strategic category leadership platforms to demonstrate thought leadership and provide category management best practice recommendations.

Collaborate with Marketing on annual category insightsresearch learning plan and to take direction on specific research projects.

Train customer management peronnel on category and shopper insight methodology and help transform the category management function to be able to better leverage and activate shopper/consumer insights.

Lead discovery and articulation of new category and shopper insights, and the business opportunities derived from them, and ensure learning is understood by the organization.

Ensure conclusions and business recommendations for all research are clearly communicated, bringing them to bear on all business issues and opportunities and sharing responsibility with the Marketing team for recommendations being converted to business decisions.

Using business knowledge and strategic thinking ability to direct the interpretation, use, and implications of shopper, marketplace, competitive and environmental information to improve business decisions and knowledge base for future strategic planning.

Having base of credibility as a 'business partner' vs 'data or information provider'

Providing input into the development of new improved analytic and research tools, methods, and processes.

Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in Business required, MBA desired.

5-10 years of sales experience, 1-2 years of category management experience.

Requires 30-50% travel
*cb