Procurement Category Specialist, Customer Marketing

**Contract:** 12 month FTC

**Location:** Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Madrid, Hamburg - hybrid working

With over 200 brands sold in nearly 180 countries, we’re the world’s leading premium drinks company. Bring your passion and use your curiosity as you explore, collaborate, and innovate to build brands consumers love. Together with passionate people from all over the world, you’ll test new ideas, learn and grow, and unlock a brighter, more exciting future. Join us to create a career worth celebrating!

**About the function**

Our Procurement team are innovators, always seeking new ways to help our business, people and much-loved brands thrive. We’re dedicated to maximising the £12 billion+ we spend every year, building brands of premium quality, while creating sustainable value and growth. Together, we’re shaping the services, partnerships and innovations that meet our future needs. Our procurement team delivers outstanding end-to-end value across our supply chain and offers innovative supplier solutions. Together, we’re driving our 'Society 2030: Spirit of Progress' plan across suppliers and agency partners to create a more sustainable world. Wherever you choose to carve your career, we’ll support and encourage you in our inclusive culture.

**About this role**

The Customer Marketing Procurement Specialist role is part of our global community of procurement professionals. The global community is responsible for delivering a significant contribution towards Diageo’s business, productivity and growth goals. Within Customer Marketing, the Category is a top investment area across POS, Experiential & Customer A&P spend.

As Category Specialist in our European Procurement team, you will help manage procurement projects across all markets in the European region. This includes Great Britain, Ireland, France, Iberia, DACH (Germany, Switzerland & Austria), Italy, Benelux & Nordics, Greece, Poland, Eastern Europe (EE), and Middle East & North Africa (MENA). You will partner with wider Customer Marketing team, both regionally and globally where required across the following initiatives:

• Building Category Market Implementation Plans: Applying strategic procurement excellence, through feeding into the Global Category Strategy and creation of the Europe Category Strategy/Implementation plan. Your plans should consider market insights, deliver excellence benefits, and drive value in line with targets.
• Strategic Execution: Supporting end-to-end execution of category strategies, working with global and other market category professionals in line with strategy.
• Business Partnering: Cultivate and nurture key stakeholder connections internally and externally to help shape investment decisions, drive commercial advantage, minimize risk, and ensure quality of delivery and performance.
• Agency Ecosystem Management: Drive development and optimization of the agency ecosystem for business and brand needs.
• Sourcing Excellence: Spearhead sourcing activities including negotiating with agency partners, implementing workplans, navigating agency selection processes, and contracting.
• Relationship Collaboration Programme (RCP) Leadership: Drive RCP initiatives across relevant areas.
• Driving the Highest Standards of Compliance: Through risk management processes, spend monitoring, segmentation, savings tracking & reporting, contract management, cost modelling/benchmarking.
• Data-Led Decision Making: Utilize key tools and data to generate insights that enable you to objectively challenge established practices to stimulate alternative thinking and influence decision-making.
• Subject Expertise: Develop deep expertise in specific spend categories.

**About you**

We are looking for a dynamic individual with high levels of energy and commitment and a relentlessness in the pursuit of goals. You will be required to thrive in an agile and fast-paced environment & always aim to find clarity in ambiguous situations. Your application will be assessed across the following criteria:

• Significant marketing procurement experience preferably within BTL marketing.
• Independent thinker with strong leadership & communication skills, able to inspire internal marketing team members and external agency partners.
• Strong analytical skills lined to a commercial 'business owner' mindset.
• Deep understanding of cost drivers that can influence the end-to-end value chain.
• Demonstration of consistent performance examples of executing projects that made strategic change for your area.
• Examples of how you drive change through influencing business stakeholders.
• Industry knowledge and 'outside-in' thinking to drive business improvements.
• Your ability to communicate & articulate across all levels of the organization.
• Experience developing and carrying out category and procurement strategies is advantageous.
• Experience in high-spend negotiations in a Procurement function would be advantageous.
• Experience in a Procurement, Finance, Project Management, Marketing, Commercial or other relevant role.
• Experience in FMCG or beverage sector would be a bonus.

**Working with Us**

Flexibility is key to success in our business and many of our staff work flexibly in many different ways, including part-time, compressed hours, flexible location. Please talk to us about what flexibility means to you and don’t let anything stop you from applying. Join us and you can also expect a highly competitive and flexible rewards and benefits package including:

• Competitive base salary and bonus scheme
• Contemporary work life balance policies and wellbeing activities
• Contributory pension scheme
• Comprehensive health insurance for you and your family
• Share options

Celebrating our inclusive and diverse culture is core to Diageo’s purpose of “celebrating life every day everywhere”. This purpose is inclusive in nature, as it values everybody irrespective of background, disability, religion, gender identity, sexuality or ethnicity. We know that for our business to thrive and for Diageo to realize its ambition, we depend on having diverse talent with a range of backgrounds, skills and capabilities in each of the 180 countries in which we operate and to reflect our broad consumer base. We view diversity as one of the key enablers that helps our business to grow and our values, purpose and standards set the conditions for us to respect the unique contribution each person brings. Our ambition is to create the best performing, most trusted and respected Consumer Products Company in the world. To achieve these, we need the world’s very best people. We’re looking for people with creativity, boldness and a sense of purpose to take Diageo and our timeless, pioneering brands to the next level.