Customer Category Manager at Nestlé

Position Summary

• We have a fantastic opportunity for a Customer Category Manager to join our Nutrition Commercial Development team. This is an exciting and pivotal role in the team that will see you develop, manage and execute our customer category plans working in partnership with our major multiple customers.  We are looking for an experienced commercial or category professional who has the ability to always ‘put the category first’ ensuring we operate as a real impartial strategic partner to our customers. What’s key is that we deliver value added insight that drives category growth for the long term with our customers. 

A day in the life of a Customer Category Manager...

• As Customer Category Manager, you'll be at the intersection of commercial strategy and brand growth, driving category initiatives and brand innovation that helps the lives of millions of consumers. 
• Every day brings fresh challenges and opportunities as you orchestrate our category vision across major retailers. You'll partner with marketing teams to transform category & consumer insights into compelling category strategies for our brands that unlock incremental category growth for retailers. Building credibility and trust with retail partners will be key to enabling a collaborative partnership so that you can bring these plans to life at point of purchase. 
• You will be responsible for developing and deploying tailored channel and category plans at a customer level, including point of purchase solutions to deliver overall category growth resulting in market share growth for Nestlé, whilst ensuring impartiality with the customer. 

You will also:

• Lead category strategy development for some of the UK's largest retailers
• Build and nurture key stakeholder relationships across the business & externally with customers 
• Drive the category rationale and sell in story for Nestlé innovation and be a driving force to determine how our brands show up in store
• Build great external relationship by being the first port of call and a trusted source for Buying/Merchandising Teams relating to any category questions, insight and recommendations
• Execute Nestlé Category Strategy, personalisation of the Category Strategy to meet the retailer’s needs and generate engagement and commitment.
• Successfully execute the category drivers for the channel within your customer via the delivery of the point of purchase (POP) Vision, through adjacency and flow recommendations to retailers at range reviews and throughout the year.
• Deliver best in class insight, engaging retailers with promotional insight to influence the effective use of promotions, developing and implementing best in class examples of latest online and in store executions.
• Have a deep understanding of the role of the shopper within your customer.
• Lead the Category agenda within the integrated commercial planning (ICP) process, ensuring our internal plans are fit for purpose for our Customers.
• Closely monitor industry and competitor activity, to ensure our strategic commercial vision is in line with market demands in a constantly changing, competitive environment that we work in.

What will make you successful

• While previous category or commercial experience is essential (FMCG experience is a plus), what truly matters is your ability to influence, engage, and deliver results. You will be passionate, tenacious, results focused and enjoy working in a highly energetic and exciting environment. Acting as an ambassador for our Nestlé brands, you will have commercial capability and have experience of influencing across all levels internally and externally, ideally within a matrix structure.

The ideal candidate will bring:

• Sharp commercial instincts backed by strong analytical capabilities
• Proven ability to spot opportunities in data and turn them into compelling business opportunities
• Track record of building strong relationships and influencing at all levels
• Talent for navigating ambiguity and spotting the opportunity in difficult situations
• Experience in creating and selling category plans that retailers want to execute 
• We're looking for someone who gets energized by understanding the 'why' behind shopper behaviour and isn't afraid to challenge the status quo. You'll need to be equally comfortable diving into data, presenting to senior stakeholders, and collaborating across teams to drive change. 
• Most importantly, you'll bring fresh thinking and the courage to disrupt – always with the end goal of driving category growth through our brands.