Category Specialist - Energy & Beverage

About the role

Red Bull is looking for a Category Specialist in Cape Town to build long-term relationships with its retail partners and help them grow the Energy and wider Beverage category. Reporting to the Category Manager, the role owns the account- and channel-level category blueprint across retail and gas, including planograms, ranging, space recommendations and category captaincy materials. It combines shopper, customer and performance data to give recommendations that help retail partners win space, distribution and execution.

Key responsibilities

• Build trusted relationships with National Account teams, Sales leaders and priority customers, and support or lead category conversations and reviews with fact-based recommendations.
• Contribute to customer business planning and joint business plans, covering range, space, location, availability, pricing, promotions and execution.
• Analyse NielsenIQ or equivalent syndicated data, retailer scan and loyalty data, shopper research, market demographics, internal sales data and execution measures, and track category size, growth, share, distribution, price, promotion, innovation, competitor activity and shopper behaviour.
• Produce regular category reviews and account-specific recommendations, partner with the Insights team on shopper and channel research, and act as an internal category subject-matter resource.
• Develop and scale insight-led solutions such as Beverage Zones, Energy Zones, impulse executions and cross-merchandising, tailored by customer, store format and channel, and turn white-space opportunities into defined propositions.
• Work with POS, Trade Marketing and Field Sales so solutions are practical and implemented to the agreed Look of Success, and support pilots and evaluation.
• Advise on planograms for the Energy and Beverage category, applying principles of assortment, SKU productivity, share of space, shelf flow, adjacency, pack architecture and shelf position, and maintain version-controlled planogram libraries.
• Train field teams on category opportunities and support the annual retailer conference and retailer training on category management.

Required profile

• Minimum 3-5 years of experience in Category, Insights analysis or Key Account sales in the FMCG industry.
• Experience with syndicated data (Nielsen & IRI), Nielsen Panel (homescan) and shopper metrics.
• Customer-facing experience; travels up to 25% of the time working with retailers.
• In-depth knowledge of the FMCG industry and the South African retail industry.

Required skills

• Excellent analytical skills and strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Highly proficient in Microsoft Office, especially Excel and PowerPoint.
• Familiarity with planogram software such as JDA is an asset.
• Strong project management and planning competencies.