Job Summary:

This is an exciting new role at GSP! The ideal candidate lives and breathes retail, and has a strong, brick-and-mortar retail background as well as a passion for building great brands. GSP wants you to help us bring clarity to our retail customers, mostly in the convenience space. The market is constantly evolving, and new challenges arise with each season. The Customer Success Manager will help us home in on competitive retail store solutions, spot opportunities, and empower brands with impactful direction and decisive action based on market intelligence. You will be a primary leader on our Design Services team, influencing decision-making by educating and guiding key stakeholders across our organization as well as our valued customers through regular, insightful deliverables. In fact, your understanding of the shopper's experience will help make our customers' stores better. You will become our eyes and ears for spotting store trends, documenting your findings and compiling a 3,000-mile store walk playbook. The ideal candidate will wear three hats when walking stores, that of a Shopper on a mission to buy, a Marketer who understands business impact and merchandising efforts, and a Creative Director who sees how even the basics can become desirable. You will become our expert in the shopper journey and translate your research into recommendations for design elements and promotions needed to drive success for our customers.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• 
  Be able to "walk" convenience stores across the nation, understanding the merchandising, marketing,

and shopper experience.

• Own the development and execution of proprietary research initiatives, which may include managing research vendors, projects, timelines and deliverables.
• Create a playbook of store and design fundamentals that make up the desired shopper journey including site adjacencies, fixture elements, POP and other in-store and online shopper activation methodologies.
• Create easily consumable, visualized reports of customer research for key stakeholders and executives, with actionable insights to influence decision making.
• Build the competitive market intelligence function, adding areas of value as needed.
• Fully understand all facets of in-store execution strategies, especially for convenience stores, grocery stores

and specialty retail.

• Provide insight to leadership team on a monthly/quarterly cadence regarding convenience, QSR and overall brick-and-mortar trends, note market shifts and possible industry implications.
• Condense and deliver reports to our customers with actionable insights.
• Coach sales team and educate them on competitive intelligence.
• Stay up to date on consumer trends and design trends in retail environments, especially regarding POP and social media promotions, foodservice, loyalty programs, layouts, flooring, lighting, shelving and more.
• Provide strategic level content in presentations to high level executives.

Education and Experience:

• 
  BS/BA in Marketing, Business, Retail Management, Economics or related field
• 8+ years of competitive market intelligence/research preferred, preferably with retail-driven experience in foodservice, CPG, grocery or retail
• Ability to spot trends and translate research findings into actionable strategies
• Elevate delivery of your insights through strong storytelling, photography and PowerPoint/design skills

Qualifications, Skills, Abilities and Competencies:

• Project management skills and ability to manage multiple simultaneous projects
• Must have great eye for design details, i.e.: size, scale, color, shape, proportion, viewing distances and angles
• Microsoft Office, especially Word and PowerPoint
• Collaboration and relationship skills: Ability to interact with all levels of our organization
• Ability to contribute to building a strong and positive team spirit as well as align with GSP values
• Candidate must be able to commute within their metro area and travel in the United States as needed. Travel Required: 50%