Sr. Category Leader, Marketing & Communications

Location: Onsite, four days per week - Kohler, WI

Opportunity

This is an exciting opportunity to shape how Kohler invests in media and marketing partnerships that build our brands, reach consumers, and drive business impact. The Senior Category Leader - Marketing & Communications, will serve as a strategic partner to Marketing, bringing commercial discipline, supplier insight, and market expertise to help maximize value, improve transparency, and enable smarter, faster decisions across a dynamic and evolving media landscape. This senior role will focus on all kinds of marketing media planning, development, execution and distribution.

Scope and Responsibilities

• Lead media procurement strategy and sourcing execution for Kohler's marketing organization, including paid media, digital, programmatic, social, search, retail media, agency services, measurement, and related marketing technology.

• Partner with marketing, brand, finance, legal, privacy, analytics, and agency stakeholders to translate business needs into sourcing strategies, scopes of work, contract requirements, performance expectations, and supplier governance plans.

• Lead competitive sourcing events, supplier evaluations, bid analysis, negotiations, award recommendations, renewals, and contract changes for media agencies, platforms, and related suppliers.

• Analyze spend, supplier proposals, rate cards, agency fees, media pricing models, contract terms, market dynamics, and performance data to support fact-based decisions and total value recommendations.

• Manage supplier relationships and governance routines, including scorecards, business reviews, issue resolution, escalation paths, performance commitments, renewal planning, and continuous improvement actions.

• Deliver category value through cost avoidance, savings, risk reduction, improved transparency, supplier accountability, and stronger return on marketing investment including Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

• Provide media procurement expertise on agency models, fee structures, commercial terms, brand safety, content rights and evolving media market trends.

• Communicate sourcing activity, supplier performance, risks, value delivered, and recommended improvements to procurement, marketing, and senior business leaders.

Key Media/Marketing Subject Matter Expertise:

• Strong understanding of paid media categories, agency models, media platforms, fee structures, retainer and rate cards, media markups, and other key commercial levers.

• Strong understanding of marketing performance and value metrics (e.g., return on ad spend, cost per acquisition, engagement and conversion)

• Ability to evaluate supplier proposals using business impact, service quality, performance, risk, and total cost of ownership metrics.

• Familiarity with digital marketing ecosystem, supplier landscape, and compliance considerations (data privacy, IP rights, and content usage).

• Connect sourcing decisions to Kohler's brand priorities, marketing objectives, risk mitigation, value creation, and budget effectiveness.

• Manage complexity by making sense of complex media, supplier, contract, budget, and performance information to define issues and solve problems.

Key Procurement Subject Matter Expertise:

• Contract Proficiency

• Understand the importance of contract quality and deliver to high standards

• Interpret business, commercial and legal contract terms and conditions and communicate them so that associates of all levels can understand them

• Independently manage and lead sourcing and contracting processes

• Negotiation

• Negotiate marketing and communications services engagements and agreements with a focus on media

• Seek to increase the amount of negotiation power and leverage in every opportunity, and when that is not possible, negotiate well within varying degrees of power and leverage

• Analyze commercial aspects of proposals and contracts, with a focus on delivering against appropriate marketing/communications metrics and overall value (not just reductions in cost)

• Category and Supplier Management:

• Develop media category strategies that balance cost, quality, speed, innovation, compliance, supplier performance, and business outcomes.

• Use spend data, supplier insights, benchmarks, market intelligence, and risk assessments to build fact-based sourcing recommendations.

• Govern supplier relationships through scorecards, business reviews, issue resolution, accountability routines, and continuous improvement plans.

• Interpersonal Competencies and Capabilities:

• Delight internal customers and stakeholders by accepting responsibility and holding self, suppliers, and stakeholders accountable to timelines, commitments, service levels, compliance expectations, and performance outcomes.

• Build and maintain key internal and external relationships, including those with senior leaders including directors, VPs and C-suite-level officers

• Proactively keep stakeholders up to date with timely, effective communication

• Inspire internal associate teams to always do what is right for Kohler Co

• Boldly innovate through process improvements and through finding new ways to do things

• Work independently and own workstreams as if this was your company

• Be comfortable asking questions when the desired outcome is unclear

• Prioritize competing workstreams according to their real level of urgency, anticipates risks, improves processes, and drives timely execution.