Sr. Category Leader, Marketing & Communications
Work Mode: Onsite
Location: Onsite, four days per week - Kohler, WI
Opportunity
This is an exciting opportunity to shape how Kohler invests in media and marketing partnerships that build our brands, reach consumers, and drive business impact. The Senior Category Leader – Marketing & Communications, will serve as a strategic partner to Marketing, bringing commercial discipline, supplier insight, and market expertise to help maximize value, improve transparency, and enable smarter, faster decisions across a dynamic and evolving media landscape. This senior role will focus on all kinds of marketing media planning, development, execution and distribution.
Scope and Responsibilities
- Lead media procurement strategy and sourcing execution for Kohler’s marketing organization, including paid media, digital, programmatic, social, search, retail media, agency services, measurement, and related marketing technology.
- Partner with marketing, brand, finance, legal, privacy, analytics, and agency stakeholders to translate business needs into sourcing strategies, scopes of work, contract requirements, performance expectations, and supplier governance plans.
- Lead competitive sourcing events, supplier evaluations, bid analysis, negotiations, award recommendations, renewals, and contract changes for media agencies, platforms, and related suppliers.
- Analyze spend, supplier proposals, rate cards, agency fees, media pricing models, contract terms, market dynamics, and performance data to support fact-based decisions and total value recommendations.
- Manage supplier relationships and governance routines, including scorecards, business reviews, issue resolution, escalation paths, performance commitments, renewal planning, and continuous improvement actions.
- Deliver category value through cost avoidance, savings, risk reduction, improved transparency, supplier accountability, and stronger return on marketing investment including Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
- Provide media procurement expertise on agency models, fee structures, commercial terms, brand safety, content rights and evolving media market trends.
- Communicate sourcing activity, supplier performance, risks, value delivered, and recommended improvements to procurement, marketing, and senior business leaders.
Key Media/Marketing Subject Matter Expertise:
- Strong understanding of paid media categories, agency models, media platforms, fee structures, retainer and rate cards, media markups, and other key commercial levers.
- Strong understanding of marketing performance and value metrics (e.g., return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, engagement and conversion)
- Ability to evaluate supplier proposals using business impact, service quality, performance, risk, and total cost of ownership metrics.
- Familiarity with digital marketing ecosystem, supplier landscape, and compliance considerations (data privacy, IP rights, and content usage).
- Connect sourcing decisions to Kohler’s brand priorities, marketing objectives, risk mitigation, value creation, and budget effectiveness.
- Manage complexity by making sense of complex media, supplier, contract, budget, and performance information to define issues and solve problems.
Key Procurement Subject Matter Expertise:
- Understand the importance of contract quality and deliver to high standards
- Interpret business, commercial and legal contract terms and conditions and communicate them so that associates of all levels can understand them
- Independently manage and lead sourcing and contracting processes
- Negotiation
- Negotiate marketing and communications services engagements and agreements with a focus on media
- Seek to increase the amount of negotiation power and leverage in every opportunity, and when that is not possible, negotiate well within varying degrees of power and leverage
- Analyze commercial aspects of proposals and contracts, with a focus on delivering against appropriate marketing/communications metrics and overall value (not just reductions in cost)