Category Management is a wide and varied job. You often have to think on your feet and outside of the box. Category Management can also vary between businesses in terms of what's included in the role. It can also be its own function, a part of marketing or report into commercial. Despite these differences in how the role functions there are some key skills that are always important.
Data Analysis
Being able to interpret and understand numbers and data is a key foundation to category management. You also need to have a good grasp of where the data is coming from, where have these numbers come from? A real physical purchase? A scaled up number from a sample? A model that generates a segment that is only fixed in one moment in time? It's important to know where it comes from so when you come to use it you understand what the recommendation is based on.
Influencing
Data work, analysis and insight isn’t even half the task, actually getting someone to do something about your findings is the next hurdle. Being able to influence is key. To influence you need to understand the audience and become a reliable trusted source of advice, insight and information to your stakeholders. Category managers are one of the most important influencers in any FMCG business as they know the market, their products and their customers inside out and should be the first port of call for any questions about what to do next.
Horizon Scanning
Looking ahead, forward planning, thinking about what’s around the corner. Managing a category needs to have an opinion or a view about what's coming next. What are behaviours going to be in 3, 6 or 12 months time? And then what does this mean for your category? Will people shop it more or less? Will they want different types of products? Different sizes? Different uses?
Persistence
Just because you’ve made a fantastic well backed up and researched recommendation about something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen overnight. You may need to continue to repeat this for many many months, to different audiences and stakeholders before anything can get moving. Hopefully someone in a competitor won’t get there first but if that does happen it will at least add more weight to the argument.
Relationship Building
Building relationships with your stakeholders is key. You want them to give time to listen to you, answer your calls, prioritise your mails. How you build a relationship is often something very personal and in my experience spending time listening, taking time to understand and help can get you a long way.
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