Deadline Draws Near for Category Captains Awards Entries

Applications are now being accepted for Progressive Grocer’s 17th annual Category Captains Awards competition, which recognizes overall excellence in innovative, creative, profit-generating category management platforms.

PG will present its new slate of Category Captains and Category Advisors in its November 2013 issue, which will be devoted to showcasing overall excellence and continued achievement among next-generation category management leaders across the industry.

All qualified Category Captain entries will be preliminarily qualified by PG’s editorial staff, and then carefully evaluated by an impartial judging panel comprising a cross-section of retailers, marketing executives and industry experts.

All Category Captain applicants will be evaluated against three requisite components: innovation, delivery of measured results and direct performance feedback from retailers. All winners will be notified by PG in mid-September 2013. Entries lacking all specified criteria will be disqualified.

Complete Category Captain Awards entry, including a downloadable entry form, can be found here, while general details of the awards program can also be found below:

1. Innovation: All entries must include an overview synopsis, submitted as an attachment with the downloadable form in a Microsoft Word document of 800 words or fewer, describing new category management initiatives your company/organization has employed over the past 12 months. The synopsis should include compelling examples of new programs, technologies, business systems, merchandising schemes and/or promotional tactics that played a key role in your category development initiatives to accomplish such crucial objectives as product differentiation in a specific supermarket category and/or increased sales for all products in the specified category.

2. Results/Overall Retail Performance: Submit supporting verifiable, comparable market-specific or account-specific sales or market share data that supports your claims about the effectiveness of your category management program/platform.

3. Art/Graphics: Submit an electronic image of one or more of the products/programs mentioned in your synopsis. Images must be 300.dpi in resolution, in .tif or .jpg format; 4x4 preferable for size.

Please submit completed PG Category Captain entry forms and related images to [email protected] by Sept. 6, 2013.