According to Nielsen Company, category management is a process that involves managing product categories as business units and customizing them on a store by store basis to satisfy customer needs. Often specialists debated whether Category Management should fall under Data Science, Purchasing, Sales or Marketing. According to Chartered Institute of Marketing, marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. In fact Category Management falls right in the middle between Sales, Marketing, Purchasing, Data Analytics and IT.

Key benefits:

  • Immediately APPLY category management practices in your respective industry
  • INCREASE category margins, optimize supply chain, choose the right products to deliver the right category profit
  • LOWER costs related to supply chain
  • OPTIMIZE inventory costs
  • Negotiate BETTER deals with your suppliers
  • IMPROVE delivery times
  • AVOID zero-stock situations
  • BENCHMARK against best practices

Why you shouldn’t miss it

  • To learn-by-doing: all attendees are involved in solving business cases related to category management
  • To apply key category management principles to increase profits
  • To learn best practices: learn where other companies succeeded and why, but also learn where others failed and why
  • To choose the right technologies: identify top applications and services to help you take the best category management decisions
  • To apply data insights: learn how to aggregate data in order to provide you the best intelligence in making business decisions, learn key performance indicators in Category Management
  • The learn how category management improved businesses in certain case studies from the trainer’s experience
  • To avoid analyzing the wrong data
  • Networking opportunities with your peers
  • To choose the right KPIs and monitor them regularly
  • To increase your impact in your company’s business

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

  • Category Managers
  • Data Scientists
  • Digital Marketers
  • Marketing Product Managers
  • Purchase Managers

Target Industry:

  • Retail
  • Telco
  • FMCG


Detailed Agenda:

Day 1

Introduction and Session Objectives:

  • Components of Category Planning
  • Using data types and analysis
  • Develop a set of category insights and identify opportunities
  • Create Category Strategies based on insights
  • Develop Tactical blueprints that support the Category Strategies

Category Management Overview

  • Category Planning Best Practice Model
  • Category Business Plan Output – Best Practices

Category Definition

  • Elements of a Category
  • How Retailers define Categories
  • Designing the Category Structure
  • Examples of Category Structures
  • Exercise

Category Role

  • Destination vs Routine vs Convenience
  • Using data to select Category Roles
  • Examples
  • Exercise
  • Best practice: Retailer

Getting insights from consumer research and market research

  • Insight Generation Process
  • Perspectives in Insight Generation

Key Performance Indicators

  • Market Share, Market Share Quadrants, Gross Profit, Gross Margin, Markup, Contribution to Margin, Gross Margin Return on Inventory Invested, GMROI Quadrant
  • Case Study: retailer

Day 2

Review of Day 1

  • Answering questions rising from Day 1

Omni-channel and Social Selling

  • Integrating in-store with e-commerce
  • Social Selling and Mobile
  • KPIs in Ecommerce

Business Intelligence – Good, Better, Best and Tools

  • Analysing the right data
  • Power BI

Strategic Planning – Category Strategy Definition

  • Understanding Strategic Choices
  • Select Strategies
  • Develop Strategies
  • Exercise

From Strategy to Tactics – Developing Key Initiatives

  • Developing Tactical Blueprints
  • Examples of Tactical Blueprints
  • Common Tactical Analytics
  • Minimizing Duplication

Key Tactics on Product, Promo, Price, People, Placement, Assortment

  • Choosing the right SKUs
  • Choosing the right brands
  • When to add/ when to delist
  • Trends in the industry: private label and own brands
  • Best practice: Retailer

Category Plan Review

  • Process for launching the plan
  • Defining the Scorecard
  • Plan communication
  • Project Management
  • Removing blockers

Excellence in Execution – Monitoring and Improving (and tools)

  • Establishing a framework for plan review
  • Determining the frequency for monitoring the KPIs

Action Planning

  • Case study: retailer
  • Best practices
  • Applying knowledge with impact in the business

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash