Global Category Specialist - Global Marketing

Procurement shapes how Unilever builds and grows its brands through partnerships, services, and materials that support the business.

You will collaborate with teams and partners around the world, helping deliver solutions that meet today's needs while shaping what comes next as a Global Category Specialist - Global Marketing.

About the role

This role is an exciting opportunity to drive Unilever's Global Marketing Procurement strategy and enable Global Brand Teams (GBTs) to deliver their critical brand ambitions through strong business partnerships across A&P+.

You will manage complex, multi-brand portfolios across markets and time zones, combining strategic leadership with commercial execution.

Main Responsibilities & Accountabilities

• Strategic GBT Business Partnering: Build influential relationships across the Global Brand Teams, shaping strategic and investment decisions and partnering with GBT brand leads to drive delivery through to markets.
• Global-to-Regional Integration: Act as the bridge between GBTs and Regional Procurement, connecting global priorities with market needs to create greater scale, consistency, and value.
• Cross-Regional Briefing & Scoping: Co-lead connected briefing and scoping across GBTs and regions, moving from fragmented project-by-project briefs towards consolidated demand and pipeline planning.
• Agency Ecosystem Leadership: Lead the development and optimisation of integrated GBT agency ecosystems, ensuring the right capabilities are aligned to brand ambitions.
• Strategic Agency Planning & Workplans: Shift agency engagement towards integrated half-year and full-year pipelines, creating stronger forward visibility, more strategic agency conversations, and consolidated workplans across brands and markets.
• Sourcing & Commercial Excellence: Drive best-in-class sourcing across critical spend categories, leading negotiations, agency selection, strategic workplans, and contracting.
• Enterprise Opportunity Creation: Identify and activate cross-regional and enterprise opportunities through connected GBT and market investment plans.
• Strategic Execution & Implementation: Partner with Global Category teams to co-create and activate category strategies, ensuring seamless execution against GBT priorities and broader regional and enterprise opportunities.
• Relationship Collaboration Programme (RCP): Lead the RCP across designated brands, creating a two-way flow of insight between GBTs, Regions, and Global Marketing Procurement.
• Cross-Team Procurement Leadership: Coordinate Global and Regional Procurement teams around shared priorities, ensuring global strategies translate into connected market execution.
• AOP, MIP & Demand Visibility: Use AOP and MIP outputs to improve investment visibility, shape budget decisions, identify value opportunities, and build Procurement delivery pipelines.
• Digital Procurement Transformation: Accelerate adoption of digital procurement tools, workflow technologies, and AI-enabled productivity platforms.
• Governance, Compliance & Risk: Maintain strong governance across risk management, spend monitoring, segmentation, savings tracking, performance reporting, contracting, and benchmarking.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Use investment, supplier, performance, and market data to challenge the status quo, identify opportunities, and influence high-quality commercial decisions.
• A&P Subject Matter Leadership: Demonstrate deep expertise across A&P categories, leading initiatives that maximise value and performance.
• Global CoE Partnership: Contribute to Global CoE strategies, ensuring GBT priorities, market realities, and local requirements are reflected in global category approaches.
• Flexible Category Collaboration: Partner across categories and Procurement teams to support enterprise programmes and broader cross-functional value creation.

Requirements

• A dynamic, globally minded procurement professional with 5–7 years' global or multi-market experience across A&P.
• Proven expertise in shaping and managing integrated agency ecosystems end-to-end.
• Experience delivering cross-market and multi-regional programmes.
• Strong strategic and commercial acumen.
• Strong business partnering and influencing skills.
• Ability to lead through influence across global and regional teams.
• Strong track record in procurement and category strategy.
• Financially astute and outcome-focused.
• Strong leadership presence and communication skills.
• Strong digital and systems capability.

Benefits

• Competitive Rewards and Benefits package.
• Flexibility to manage your wellbeing and balance your priorities.