Category Management or Category Captainship in the Consumer Value Chain?

The purpose of this study is to identify the advantages and disadvantages of the Category Management and Category Captainship, to conduct comparative analyses of them and determine the princeple differences. Within the research purpose were solved the following tasks: to reveal the essence of Category Management and Category Captainship; to describe the main stages of Category Management development; to identify and substantiate the advantages and disadvantages of investigated approaches; to conduct the comparative analyses of Category Management and Category Captainship. Based on the received results we summarize, describe the main obstacles and formulate the recommendations for retailers by the decision making about the approach choosing. Finally, we define the future research destination in this area. The article discusses the essence of Category Management and the stages of its development considering current trends in the market and in the customer behavior. Based on the existing literature analyses we identify the main factors that influence the Category Management transformation from CatMan 1.0 to CatMan 3.0 this work identifies existing advantages and disadvantages of Category Management for all participants in the customer value chain. Further we reveal the essence and main features of Category Captainship, its advantages and disadvantages. Finally we conduct comparative analyses of the investigated approaches, define the main defferences of them and formulate their limitations and obstracles. This study let to formulate the recomendations for retailers that they could use by the decision making about the approach choosing. Finally were defined the future destinations of the researches in this area.

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