Deadline Looms for PG Category Captain Nominations
Applications are now being accepted for Progressive Grocer’s 20th annual Category Captains Awards competition, which recognizes overall excellence in innovative, creative, profit-generating category management platforms – efforts that help move retailers achieve genuine shopper centricity by delivering solutions, not just products.
PG will present the new slate of Category Captains and Category Advisors in its November 2016 issue, which will be devoted to showcasing overall excellence and continued achievement among next-generation category management leaders across the industry. The extended deadline to enter is Sept. 9, 2016.
“Do you think you’re doing category management right?” asks Jim Dudlicek, PG editor-in-chief. “Think about how you’d answer some of the following questions.”
- What was the most important new shopper insight or innovation you brought to your retail customers last year?
- How did your new insight or innovation build total category volume, as opposed to solely your own brand/line(s)?
- How did your initiative promote connectivity between complementary store departments?
- What solutions are your efforts delivering to shoppers?
- What success models did you recommend to your customers in assortment, pricing and merchandising?
- Did your category program gain new accounts and expand existing ones?
- How did your platform invigorate a dormant or declining category?
- Did it leverage social media or mobile technologies in a new and creative way?
- How did your platform address the unique needs or issues of your retail customers?
- What are your retail partners saying about your category management efforts?
All Category Captain applicants will be evaluated against three requisite components: innovation to grow total category volume and deliver real shopper solutions, delivery of measured results, and direct performance feedback from retailers.
All winners will be notified by PG in mid-September 2016. Entries lacking all specified criteria will be disqualified.
Complete Category Captain Awards information, including on online entry form, can be found here, while general details of the awards program can also be found below:
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, increased sales for all products in the specified category and/or shopper-centric solutions that address key consumer need states.
Results/Overall Retail Performance: Submit 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. This information can be kept confidential upon request and does not have to be published, but should be provided to assist with our evaluation.
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 is preferable for size.
Please submit completed PG Category Captain entry forms and related images by Sept. 2, 2016.