ST. LOUIS -- CJ (Chris) Watson, vice president of small-format sales for Anheuser-Busch Inc., St. Louis, has been named to the 2015 class of Visionaries by CGT (Consumer Goods Technology) magazine.
He was named as one of "seven of the brightest minds, leading their companies down the path to success."
Watson was the initial champion of a near real-time point-of-sale (POS) capture and analytics platform that would help A-B deliver more effective category leadership initiatives with new capabilities to mine billions of records to localize merchandising, minimize out of stocks and access transaction-level data on mobile devices.
In 2013, he initiated a study to identify what winning retailers were doing to grow their category. To do this, the company needed to segment more than 40,000 retail outlets with more than 300 attributes per outlets in an effort to build growth plans by retail outlet.
“When we finished, we had actionable plans for retailers on how to grow their business, taking best practices from top performers. Ultimately, we observed significant growth in the beer category as a whole, as a top performing CPG category in 2013 and 2014,” said Watson.
Currently, Watson is working on building day-part solutions for the convenience-store channel. His team has identified four key day-parts that retailers can merchandise around to drive both traffic and profitability. With new technology and partners, they have been able to build plans around these new insights.
For inspiration, Watson always challenges his team to think about the future five to 10 years from now and ask, “What will we be laughing about that we do today?" Then, he said, build plans to make that obsolete.
His advice for the next generation?
“This business is always evolving, and if you are not challenging yourself to grow and evolve, you will fall behind,” said Watson.
Based in St. Louis, Anheuser-Busch brews Budweiser and Bud Light among many other brands. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Leuven, Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Click here to view the other 2015 Visionaries and to read the full CGT report.
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