Category captains are having a quiet renaissance. In a world of squeezed baskets, relentless promotional noise and customers who switch retailers with a swipe, ‘good enough’ category management is expensive. The best retailers are re-learning an old truth. If you want to grow share, start by growing the category. That’s where category captains can be a genuine growth engine – when they’re set up properly. At its simplest, category captainship is a collaborative arrangement in which a r
a retailer relies on a leading supplier to help shape the category plan, including range, assortment logic, space, merchandising, and promotional strategy.
Take the example of Coca-Cola. Working with retailers from supermarkets to convenience stores, the brand caters for multiple needs and occasions, not just volume. It does this by supplying products for immediate consumption versus take-home, small packs and multi-buys. The brand is shoppable across budgets. The benefit for the retailer is more consistent conversion and clearer promotion roles.
The research framing is clear: the retailer is delegating elements of category decision support to a supplier with scale, data and, most likely, international market learnings or capability. But category captains can also create risk, particularly if the role becomes a backdoor for advantaging one brand, coordinating competitive behaviour, or drifting into commercially sensitive territory.
So what does best practice look like?
A category-first mandate (in writing). The captain’s brief should be explicit: grow the category’s total value and shopper satisfaction, not the captain’s facings. Tie the work to a clear shopper mission and customer value proposition, then translate it into simple, repeatable “promotion vehicles” customers can recognise.
To see this in action, look no further than Smith’s, which publishes practical category guides designed to help retailers optimise range and merchandising. This approach codifies what good looks like, enabling stores to execute consistently. The result is a faster rollout of best practice, cleaner planogram compliance conversations, and more consistent category growth.
Omnichannel by default. Shelf doesn’t end at shelf. Captains should be accountable for the category across store, online, app, and retail media – ensuring that ranging logic, content quality, navigation, and the promotions ladder are aligned. (And don’t cannibalise margin in one channel to ‘win’ another.)
By building recommendations that translate across store and online environments, leading brands bring to the table range logic, content cues, and the shopper experience. The flow-on effect is a cleaner digital shelf, fewer substitutions/returns, and stronger repeat behaviour because shoppers can fulfil their needs every time.
A test-and-learn operating rhythm. The best captaincy isn’t a once-a-year category reset. It’s a rolling cadence: quarterly category sprints, faster micro-tests (end caps, shelf adjacencies, digital shelf placement, search, onsite), and post-event learnings that actually change the next plan.
Supplier ecosystem management. Great captains behave like stewards. They create transparent supplier scorecards, protect pathways for innovation (including challengers), and design modular space plans that can flex without a rebuild whenever a new product launches.
Case in point is Colgate. The brand skillfully turns shopper insight into retailer-ready shelf execution by leveraging consumer research and scan data to customer narratives for activation. The payoff for retailers is better navigation, higher trade-up, and fewer random SKUs that confuse the shelf.
When working with brands like Colgate, retailers can make better decisions faster. By calling on the brand’s deeper category expertise, disciplined planning is achieved without building a massive internal analytics function from scratch.
It also means a cleaner in-store experience. Less random assortment creep, clearer navigation, stronger conversion moments and fewer “Why is this even here?” SKUs. It’s more profitable for promo and media. A captain-led calendar can shift retailers from blunt discounting to sharper promotional roles (trial, trade-up, seasonal missions), often funded in partnership and increasingly amplified through retail media, with better measurement.
This comes with the added bonus of stronger supplier relationships – with fewer headaches. Clear governance reduces noise, speeds negotiation, and improves execution quality across the supplier base. In short, category captains work when the retailer stays firmly in the driver’s seat (setting the mission, owning the data, enforcing the rules) while letting the captain bring the horsepower.
Done well, it’s not an outsourcing strategy. It’s industrialising growth.
Simon Porter is the head of retail at media agency Hatched.
Further reading: Coke CEO talks most memorable campaigns and the future of AI-driven advertising
