- Understand customer needs through:
- Visits to customers
- Interactions with customer-facing teams
- Focus groups and customer delight tickets
- Analyze competing offerings across multiple offline and online channels
- Study on-app customer behavior, including:
- Search patterns
- Traffic flows
- Conversion funnel performance
- Monitor market trends and industry dynamics influencing customer demand
- Define the Customer Value Proposition and craft the end-to-end customer experience for the category
- Develop a category strategy and create annual category plans at both overall and city/regional levels using top-down and bottom-up inputs
- Translate annual plans into detailed monthly plans with defined owners and explicit checkpoints
- Drive execution of category plans to achieve topline and bottom-line goals
- Define the ideal selection/assortment to meet customer needs and collaborate with Category Buyers to ensure product availability
- Partner with Central Marketing to:
- Drive relevant traffic to the Super Category
- Optimize traffic flow to individual categories
- Improve product discovery and boost conversion rates
- Collaborate with Catalog and Product teams to:
- Enhance catalog quality
- Showcase key attributes to support informed customer decisions
- Work with Product teams to improve organic category navigation and search performance
- Own the creation and execution of targeted promotions & campaigns
- Track campaign performance daily and coordinate with merchandising/marketing to optimize ROI
- Collaborate with Business Operations and Price Benchmarking teams to:
- Build and maintain a price benchmarking process (online and offline)
- Ensure competitive pricing
- Own the Category P&L; and customer experience
- Provide accurate demand projections to Category Buyers for consistent availability and minimal inventory losses
- Support Category Buyers with insights to drive high-ROI investments for brand partners
- Continuously improve customer experience by aligning internal stakeholders (product, supply chain, buying) to customer expectations
- Establish a robust process for early identification and resolution of product quality and CX issues
- Partner with city and regional Customer Growth teams to deliver local growth and profitability goals
- Hire, train, and mentor a team (Category Planning, Category Marketing, and Category Managers) to scale this strategy across 50–100 cities in India