Last Day to Enter Progressive Grocer's Category Captains Awards

Applications are now being accepted for Progressive Grocer’s 18th 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 2014 issue, which will be devoted to showcasing overall excellence and continued achievement among next-generation category management leaders across the industry.

Custom Solutions for Retailers

“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?
• 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?
• Did your program invigorate a dormant or declining category?
• Did your program leverage social media or mobile technologies in a new and creative way?
• Did your program address unique needs or issues of your retail customers?
• What are your retail partners saying about your category management efforts?

Enter by Sept. 8

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 2014. Entries lacking all specified criteria will be disqualified.

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

- 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.

- 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. This information can be kept confidential upon request and does not have to be published, but should be provided to assist with our evaluation.

- Submit an electronic image of one or more of the products/programs mentioned in your synopsis to [email protected] by Sept. 8, 2014. Images must be 300.dpi in resolution, in .tif or .jpg format, and 4x4 preferable for size.