Master Essential Skills & Topics for Retail and CPG

The Category Management Master's Series is a set of 12 virtual courses (recorded) with information about CatMan 2.0™ that will impact individuals’ day-to-day and futures role using an updated, advanced category management process. Get yourself or your team ready with topic-based recorded virtual courses that help learners apply new & refreshed Catman 2.0 principles through examples, strategies and tips. Who should take this program? Category management practitioners, analysts, sales, marketing and other roles who want to move to more advanced. What will I learn? How each topic is, or will be, affected by changes in the industry, Shopper, and CatMan 2.0. How to incorporate the most relevant topics into participants existing category management framework. How to apply new concepts in day-to-day work. How to speak to one’s manager, peers, and customers about the changing dynamics across different topics with clarity and understanding. How to determine which topics are the biggest priorities and opportunities for learners and their role.

Promotion, as a driver of incremental sales, has expanded way beyond traditional flyers and coupons to include websites, targeted emails, social media, and retailer mobile strategy. Participants learn to use advanced data and technology to plan effectively for this new and expanding complexity in promotion planning.

Pricing is an important but complex tactic in category management because changes can have huge implications on sales and profit. As we continue to expand understanding on just how varied the response to price changes is, we can begin to understand the variables such as online shopping, price transparency, Shopper expectations, and value.

Shopper Marketing is a brand new tactic and needs special attention to understand how it can succeed and be analyzed alongside other tactics. Learners identify the requirements for successful Shopper marketing, and the importance of using Shopper insights to develop effective Shopper marketing solutions for retailers and their categories.

This final, but critically important, implementation step is often misunderstood or even forgotten — even though success of your entire category plan relies on effective deployment. Participants understand the most efficient and effective ways for deployment.

Well-defined category foundations provide the rules, guidelines, and strategies for a category’s success or failure by aligning to how the Shopper most likely views the category; how items are segmented; and a solid category decision tree. Participants learn how to assign Category Roles and Strategies with the Shopper in mind, including their emotional needs, and be more creative when it comes to defining Retailer strategies.

According to CatMan 2.0™, interdependent roles should be in the same organization, which means Shopper Insights and Marketing belong within category management. Internal alignment cannot happen if the category management department is separated from the rest of your organization. Participants learn how to unify category and Shopper perspective, strategy, and understanding and how to measure ROI from your more sophisticated category management process and framework.

Retailers can decide how much space different categories get, which impacts the number of items carried within a category assortment; OR they allocate space to specific categories based on the number of items or product range desired. Learners consider how new data sources, technologies, and analytics can be reflected in advanced space management best practices for shelving — now and in the future.

Product assortment is where large amounts of analytic time is spent since products not carried by a retailer can’t sell. Assortment analysis determines how to fit innovation into the product range. Participants inquire how to use new data sources, technologies, and analytics in advanced assortment, and consider the impact demand-based clustering and assortment.

Category scorecards are a MUST HAVE for category plans for both Retailers and Manufacturers. That’s because every plan needs objectives by which organizations can measure success. Learners develop an advanced, Shopper-focused scorecard that includes category foundations, critical opportunities, and metrics that correlate best with opportunities.

One of the biggest changes and challenges is the integration of Shopper Insights into the Category Assessment to answer WHY they buy. Answer this very important question, and learn HOW to insert Shopper insights into assessments, review and analytics.

Category assessments are WHERE opportunities are identified primarily through the evaluation of historical data. There are many ways that assessments can be improved and enhanced to reflect the Shopper to incorporate more advanced data sources and analytics. Participants learn how to derive deeper category insights.

The category management process has changed to reflect more complex and granular data, more complicated technologies, a more sophisticated Shopper, and an evolving retail Omni-Channel. Learners find out what the most important changes to the category management process are, why each of these changes was made, and the implications of these changes on their work. More importantly, they consider what they need to do differently to navigate the category management road ahead.