Senior Director, Category Leadership – Convenience Retail & Customer Shopper Insights

About the position

The Coca-Cola Category team seeks a highly skilled leader for our new Convenience Retail and Customer Shopper Insights team. This role is integral to our relationship with our customers, sales teams, and bottling partners. This is a leadership role responsible for setting strategic direction and day-to-day business requirements for our North America Convenience Retail Customer engagements. This Senior Director will also serve as the central leader for our cross-channel Customer Shopper Insights in a single, coordinated function. This role blends customer-facing category leadership with enterprise-level insight generation to ensure Coca-Cola is positioned to win with shoppers. Success in this role will require accountability in leading a high-performing team, shaping category strategy, stewarding analytic and insight capabilities, and influencing senior Customer and internal stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a high-performing, multi-disciplinary Category Leadership and Customer Shopper Insights organization.
• Recruit, retain, and grow top talent; build succession plans and strengthen analytical, technical, and strategic capabilities across the team.
• Set clear expectations and foster a culture of accountability, curiosity, inclusion, and continuous improvement.
• Lead and connect geographically dispersed teams.
• Provide strategic leadership for Convenience Retail category growth, serving as a trusted thought partner to senior Customer executives.
• Lead development of category strategies, opportunity assessments, and category blueprints that align shopper needs with Coca-Cola’s portfolio priorities.
• Translate complex data into clear, actionable recommendations that influence Customer decisions and drive category growth.
• Partner closely with Sales, Channel Strategy, and other cross-functional teams to embed category strategy into customer business plans.
• Define and own the Customer Shopper Insights agenda with a centralized approach to insight generation that standardizes best practices, and ensures insights are prioritized, actionable, and consistently shape decision-making across Customers and Channels.
• Drive the integration of shopper, Customer, and market data to deliver clear descriptive and diagnostic insights that inform business decisions.
• Enable data agility across Convenience Retail Customer capability platforms and cross-channel Shopper Insights needs to deliver descriptive and diagnostic analytics.
• Advance predictive and forward-looking analytics in partnership with Coca-Cola’s Strategic vision in collaboration with Commercial and Strategy counterparts.
• Elevate the role of Customer Shopper Insights as a core capability, ensuring it meaningfully influences category strategy, innovation and Customer engagement.

Requirements

• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in data analysis, consumer insights, category management, and/or space analytics
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to interpret complex data and translate it into actionable insights for multiple stakeholders.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to engage and influence stakeholders at all levels.
• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain strong relationships with customers by understanding their needs.
• High attention to detail at both breadth and depth.
• Advanced analytical capability – ability to draw insights and actions from primary and secondary data sources.
• Specific capabilities with customer specific data sources (84.51, EYC, etc.)
• High level of experience in data providers (Nielsen, IRI)
• High technical skill and aptitude with computer software (MS Office, JDA, Power BI, etc.)
• Demonstrated reputation for customer engagement with ability to positively drive business results.
• Ability to link category leadership strategies to customer strategies.
• Research experience with knowledge of different research techniques, experience in design and management of vendors through project delivery.
• Strong planning capability with the ability to set clear priorities, sequence work effectively, and drive progress against both near-term deliverables and long-term strategic objectives.
• Grows diverse high performing teams through tough-minded talent management and proactively seeks development opportunities for employees.
• Drives organizational performance, efficiency, & effectiveness by translating analytics into actions and results
• Demonstrated ability to lead through change, set clear direction and align teams around a shared vision that drives measurable business impact.
• Must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis and must not require The Coca-Cola Company's sponsorship to continue to work legally in the United States.

Nice-to-haves

• MBA Preferred

Benefits

• A full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position, is offered.