Sr. Director I, Category Leadership Advisor

Location(s):

United States of America

City/Cities:

Rogers

Travel Required:

00% - 25%

Relocation Provided:

No

Job Posting End Date:

April 8, 2025

Shift:

Job Description Summary:

Sr. Director I, Category Leadership – Walmart

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 II, 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
• Manages modular relay process for over a billion dollar category, including assortment deep dives and modular automation for over 6000 mods. 

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: 

• 8+ Years in CPG Industry
• Senior level experience within the consumer goods/beverages industry
• Strong knowledge of category management principles and analytic techniques

Preferred Level:

• 10+ Years in CPG Industry
• Experience across multiple disciplines beyond category management (Shopper Insights, Revenue Growth Management, etc)

SKILLS

• Advanced analytical capability
• Specific capabilities with customer specific data sources (Walmart Scintilla, Retail Link, etc.)
• High level of experience in data providers (Nielsen, Circana)
• 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<