Congratulations to Diageo on winning the inaugural Category Management Award at the 2020 Australian Drinks Awards.
The Category Management Award is new to the Australian Drinks Awards and has been introduced to inspire excellence in the sector.
It celebrates the critical competency of category management, including planning to meet category objectives, providing valuable insights, optimising category assortment and shelving.
The winner was chosen via the annual Advantage Engagement Survey. The Drinks Association has been commissioning Advantage Australia for the past decade to conduct the annual survey, which provides members with favourability ratings and qualitative retailer feedback from the off trade, on premise and wholesale channels.
“Category management is a key contributor to the retailer supplier interface,” said John McLoughlin (above), Managing Director APAC at the Advantage Group.
“I like to think of category management as the common language that both retailers and suppliers speak. We know from our data that the skills of building insightful category development plans are highly valued by retailers and as such this is a key driver of retailer engagement.
“We congratulate Diageo on collecting the Category Management Award this year. Well done Diageo on again delivering excellence in retailer engagement.”
Diageo Commercial Director Chris Shaw said his team was thrilled to win the Category Management Award.
"I’m so proud of our category management team led by Kate Bean. Winning this new award is recognition of our intent to put the customer and the shopper at the heart of everything we do in this space. We know that the biggest opportunity for our business and for our customers’ business comes from unlocking category growth, so we go into every planning session with a shared category agenda as our focus.
"It may be Diageo’s name on the award, but it’s not our award alone. It’s shared with our customers. It’s only through our collaborative efforts to build compelling joint category strategies and plans that we drive growth for all of us, led by market and retail insights, shopping insights, and consumer understanding.
"Our significant investment in our digital capabilities means we’ve been able to adapt at pace to a fast changing retail environment that will only continue to evolve in the months and years ahead."
The Australian Drinks Awards were live streamed this year and hosted by TV personality Shelly Horton.
Hundreds of drinks industry members watched as four awards were handed out for Supplier of the Year, Most Improved Supplier, Category Management and Supply Chain Management.
Diageo also took out Supplier of the Year, while Treasury Wine Estates won the Supply Chain Management Award and Asahi Premium Beverages won Most Improved Supplier.
Advantage Australia is a Corporate Partner of the Drinks Association.