Full job description Work Mode: Hybrid
Location: Hybrid at Kohler, WI
Opportunity As Director, Strategic Intelligence, your role will be to build and lead an intelligence function as the one "source of truth" for strategic market, industry, and competitive insights. You and your team will be responsible for analyzing data and insights to provide actionable, synthesized recommendations to the businesses and functions. As a thorough partner, you will be expected to deeply understand the business, market, customer, consumer, and competitive landscape to help your partners take advantage of opportunities that arise.
The Director, Strategic Intelligence oversees the consolidation of market, industry, consumer, customer, and competitive insights across businesses (Kitchen & Bath, Hospitality), geographies, and channels. The team is responsible for overall analysis of the market, strategies of competitors, and consumer trends. Success in the role is understanding the impacts of economic, geopolitical, and consumer trends on competitive and market landscapes, in pursuit of opportunities that Kohler can take advantage of to build a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage.
In understanding the past and current external forces, your role will be to predict the future through trend analysis and scenario planning. By understanding the strategies of competitors, your aim will be to predict future competitive actions and likely outcomes. And understanding the consumer and trends, your goal will be to align trends with opportunities. It is within this context that you will be asked to bring tangible (risks and) opportunities to business and functional partners.
The outputs of the Director – Strategic Intelligence include effective and efficient need-to-know market, industry, customer, consumer, and competitive "fact books" that define trends, strategies, and opportunities within each. The synthesized insights will be disseminated as input into the annual strategic planning process, as well as through proactive dissemination of insights and recommendations to business and functional partners for immediate action. The goal of the team is to bring to the forefront the opportunities inherent in the external environment.
As a facilitator and advocate of Kohler's mission, the Director's role is to bring to life risks and opportunities inherent in change, and facilitate – based on facts, insights, and strategic foresight – the strategic, long-term decisions required to act. The role partners across the organization to gather and align insights and intelligence across businesses, geographies, and functions.
As an enterprise leader, the Director is responsible for the development of strategic skill set across the organization. This includes, but is not limited to, skills in strategic though leadership, facilitation/communication, and relationship building.
Specific Responsibilities Owns the development of "one source of truth" on market, industry, customer, consumer, and competitive intelligence for the organization. Serves as the business and competitive intelligence corporate champion: Understands the interdependencies between market dynamics, customer/ channels, and competitors. Is the go-to expert on key markets/ geographies. Develops extensive knowledge of competitors' brands, products, pricing, global presence, market size and share. Works closely with business partners to accelerate growth: Develops deep understanding of business products, processes, and needs. Recommends market opportunities based on market, customer, consumer, competitive actions. Highlights potential business risks based on competitive strategies. Publishes quarterly top competitors' earnings reports and analysis in a timely manner: Collaborates with Finance and BU leaders to provide real-time internal and external business performance comparisons each quarter. Discusses and reconciles with global business teams on competitive sales growth in regional markets. Compiles and maintains market, channel, and competitive "strategic factbooks", recommending tangible actions to business units based on risks and opportunities therein: Develops perspective on future market scenarios and where risks and opportunities lie. Understands channel dynamics, trends, and strategic opportunities within each geography. Maintains deep knowledge of competitive strategies and likely future actions. Develops and implements appropriate methodologies, tools, and techniques to capture, analyze and communicate business intelligence insights to the organization. Performs market share analysis, estimation, and reporting. Supports the broader strategy organization in development of key enterprise, business, and functional strategies for the organization. Closely works with the Consumer Insights team to understand consumer impact on market, channel, and competitive posture. Attends trade shows as needed; prepares pre-show floor map for executives and generates a tradeshow review from competitive perspectives. Scans published materials, trade shows, channels, etc. for innovative products and companies as complement to Kohler's strategy. Analyzes and triangulates competitive data from market and product databases, syndicated reports, and various other sources and present them in a meaningful way. Makes oral presentations on the major business competitors in various meetings. Manages the design, development, and completion of intelligence related research projects. Skills/Requirements Bachelor's Degree in Intelligence or Business preferred, advanced degree in Intelligence a plus. Requires 10+ years of work experience; 5+ years in intelligence or strategy preferred; 2+ years experience leading teams. Experience developing and rallying team behind new vision a plus. Industry and/ or global experience is a plus. Strong familiarity with the techniques used to gather and analyze market and company data. Exceptional analytical and conceptual problem-solving skills. Extreme detail-orientation required. Ability to connect dots across disparate bodies of work, synthesizing insights. Track record building strong working relationships, including influencing without authority. Strength in creating structure within ambiguity. Flexible and agile, comfortable with making pivots. Strong oral and written communication skills. Applicants must be authorized to work in the US without requiring sponsorship now or in the future. The salary range for this position is $156,000 - $201,900. The specific salary offered to a candidate may be influenced by a variety of factors including the candidate's experience, their education, and the work location. Available benefits include medical, dental, vision & 401k.
Why Choose Kohler?
We empower each associate to #BecomeMoreAtKohler with a competitive total rewards package to support your health and wellbeing, access to career growth and development opportunities, a diverse and inclusive workplace, and a strong culture of innovation. With more than 30,000 bold leaders across the globe, we're driving meaningful change in our mission to help people live gracious, healthy, and sustainable lives.
About Us
It is Kohler's policy to recruit, hire, and promote qualified applicants without regard to race, creed, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, national origin, disability or status as a protected veteran. If, as an individual with a disability, you need reasonable accommodation during the recruitment process, please contact . Kohler Co. is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.
