Category Development Director

Company Description

BLEND360 is an acclaimed, forward-thinking Data, Digital Marketing, & AI Solutions Company, dedicated to fueling remarkable outcomes for our Fortune 500 clients. Our trajectory is one of continuous expansion, emerging at the crossroads of cutting-edge analytics, data proficiency, technology, and digital marketing excellence.

We are seeking a Category Development Director to contribute to our next level of growth and expansion for our Fortune 500 client in the CPG industry. 

Job Description

The goal of this role is to map, track and develop with our commercial teams and business category opportunities, to better position the different businesses across multiple verticals  and to improve our competitive position.

The role will help to identify new attractive segments for growth, create business plans to support, and closing gaps relative to competition. The role also identifies mix and price opportunities and manages the continuous flow of opportunities, applying the best tools and practices to define optimal recommendations.

The team goes across multiple business units, supporting our business and commercial partners to identify, prioritize, and bring our category opportunities to fruition. The role must understand market and category trends, consumer insights, and help identify the right subchannels, customers segments, products and additional components of the marketing mix necessary to address any potential growth and revenue opportunities.

Lastly, the role will provide positioning recommendations, defined along with marketing and commercial teams by identifying the right levers to pull and when, while facilitating the discipline in how we capture these opportunities.

Qualifications

Responsibilities:

• Stakeholder management:
  • Work closely business leaders and other stakeholders to proactively diagnose their main opportunities, identify strategic and tactical initiatives and set priorities
  • Identify capabilities required, benchmark best practices, create new processes, tools and methods and align on service level needs to define the right resources and budget required.
  • Create a pipeline of market, category, and brand opportunities for the stakeholders in line with their KPI’s and company goals.

Deliverables:

• Strategic Insights:
  • Identify company’s competitive positioning within the main categories, identify and operationalize benchmarks to implement company’s vision and define our business portfolio opportunities
  • Develop our market/category structure view, identify, and monitor our category drivers, spot trends, and forecast the fundamentals of our business across segments and categories to incorporate them into our plans.
• Category Development:
  • Identify category roles within the business portfolio, create our comprehensive understanding of its market structure (Products, Channels and Customers), and identify our relative position within it.
  • Understand category drivers and trends, and identify opportunities, working alongside with business and category teams, on how to improve our market exposure.
  • Develop a comprehensive understanding of consumers’ needs, category and product usage, journey pathing, organization of choice and attributes, jobs to be done, value attribution and translate that into segments and priorities for optimum targeting.
  • Collaborate with marketing teams to develop and recommend optimum marketing mix strategies, to optimize our return on investment and more effective go-to-market implementation. Provide consultative guidance for brand plan, innovation, product positioning, marketing mix and sales effectiveness.
  • Identify, segment, and prioritize channels and customers to build a pipeline of opportunities in accordance with our business needs.
• Capability Building
  • Assess our capabilities, define best practices, benchmark against other models, identify process gaps, help integrate the team within the business cycle and implement the routines for effective goals.
  • Integrate our information database, create our systems, manage multiple data sources, develop our dashboards, platforms and automate processes.

• Education:
  • Master’s degree in marketing, Business, Economics, or related field.
• Experience:
  • 5-8 years of work experience in category development and insights roles in a collaborative environment.
  • Highly skilled in with syndicated, consumer, and other insight data sources (IRI Circana, Nielsen, Numerator, etc.)
  • 5 years of experience developing comprehensive Intelligence and Insights programs.
  • 3 years working in a consultative an