The Senior Director of Category Marketing will lead our full Category and Promo Marketing team and will report to the VP, Retail Marketing. This is an incredibly exciting and critical leadership role for Whole Foods Market and is uniquely positioned at the intersection of the Business, the Brand and the Customer to help lead the delivery of our most important strategic business objectives. This leader will manage a team of category marketers supporting all aspects of our business including Perishables, Center Store, Culinary and Enterprise Category Initiatives. This team not only is responsible for translating business priorities and strategies to relevant customer messaging and marketing programs, but also manages the planning and delivery of our weekly promo marketing program and will help lead our annual strategic planning efforts across Merchandising and Marketing. This individual will partner closely with Merchandising and Marketing leadership to connect the business strategy and planning to our customer strategy to find the right balance of differentiation and value in our messaging and ensure our marketing programs have high impact, are customer focused and optimize business results.

Responsibilities:

• Lead a high functioning and collaborative team, focusing on coaching and developing team members at various levels and in various roles.
• Partner closely with our Insights & Analytics team to identify business and customer opportunities that will serve to inform strategy and program development
• Lead team to develop omni-channel strategies for marketing programs and promotions that consider variances in customer behavior and category performance across our instore and online channels
• Partner closely with Merchandising leaders to help refine and integrate customer considerations and strategy into our category and broader business strategies.
• Lead Category Marketing team in collaborating closely with all other Marketing teams, including Brand, Creative, Channel and Marketing Ops to bring programs to life, align to strategy, optimize process, and ensure general visibility to business priorities across Marketing.
• Ensure programming and marketing programs adhere to Whole Foods Market brand principles and contribute to a consistent and elevated customer experience both in and out of our stores.
• Partner closely with Merchandising leadership to ensure messaging supporting some of our company wide priorities such as owned brand differentiation, Local assortment, and product discovery, is relevant to the customer and helps drive positive results
• Lead the development and alignment to our Annual Calendar of priority programs, holidays and seasonal events.
• Embody “customer obsession” by leading team toward a greater level of personalized and targeted content through leveraging customer behavioral and propensity data to integrate a more specific customer lens into all our programming.
• Lead our messaging around quality and product standards, including Sourced for Good, Organics, Animal-Welfare, Seafood Sustainability, Dairy standards, and ingredient standards
• Partner closely with Promo Strategy and Planning team and Supplier Marketing team to integrate promo plans into our marketing programming and ensure supplier brand commitments are accounted for
• Lead and facilitate recurring leadership alignment meetings with SVP and VP leaders in Merchandising and Marketing
• Partner with our Enterprise Analytics team to evaluate the effectiveness of our programming and hold team accountable to continuous improvement.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Strong strategic leadership skills, capable of overseeing a critical and highly visible function at Whole Foods Market
• Able to develop a vision and lead a team and the broader organization to work together to deliver against that vision
• Able to navigate the organization and collaborate to gain buy-in across multiple teams and stakeholders, including leading with and without direct authority
• Able to translate overarching strategic objectives into clear, tangible communication plans and actions
• Ability to source, identify and develop talent
• Strong business acumen – anchoring decisions in data and insights, but also with strong intuition of the customer’s needs
• Demonstrates nuanced understanding of the Whole Foods Market business, food retail industry, and the business models of key strategic partners and competitors
• Able to assess how key functions, processes, and operating models impact business and financial performance
• Able to “connect the dots” across markets, customers, partners, and programs to identify interdependencies and long-term growth opportunities
• Earn trust and establish credibility with senior level leaders across the organization
• Serves as a leader in service of her or his team, and is a strong advocate for our broader team vision and goals
• Operates as a change leader, with a high degree of resiliency and ability to navigate ambiguity

Qualifications:

• BA degree and 8-10+ years of relevant retail experience in retail marketing, category marketing and/or brand marketing or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience
• Graduate degree preferred
• Purpose driven and passionate about quality standards
• Experience in both brick-and-mortar and online retail is a plus
• General knowledge and experience with product marketing, customer targeting, strategic brand planning, and marketing channel strategy
• 4-8 years of effectively managing a team at progressively elevated levels of leadership over the course of her/his career

At Whole Foods Market, we provide a fair and equal employment opportunity for all Team Members and candidates regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristic. Whole Foods Market hires and promotes individuals solely based on qualifications for the position to be filled and business needs.