COMPANY BACKGROUND With 2007 revenue of approximately $2 billion, American Greetings is the world's largest publicly owned creator, manufacturer and distributor of greeting cards and other social expression products. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings employs approximately 18,000 full-time equivalent associates around the world and is home to one of the world's largest creative studios.
The company's major domestic greeting card brands are Carlton Cards, American Greetings and Gibson. American Greetings services approximately 70,000 retail stores in the United States and 125,000 worldwide.

American Greetings' other domestic products include DesignWare party goods, Plus Mark gift wrap and boxed cards, DateWorks calendars and AGI Instore display fixtures. Their Internet and wireless business unit, AG Interactive, is a leading provider of electronic greetings, ringtones for cellular telephones and other content for the digital marketplace. The Carlton Retail division is the largest owned and operated chain of card and gift shops in North America with approximately 500 stores in the United States and Canada.

BASIC FUNCTION Essential position functions include:
Leadership:
• Embed fact-based decision making and an appetite for insights throughout the organization.
• Create and foster a "test and learn" culture throughout the organization.
• Upgrade Business Intelligence teams with best in class analytical skills, as well as consultative, communication and leadership capabilities.
• Drive transformational effort that makes business intelligence a key competitive advantage.
Analysis & Insight:
• Analyze information and deliver insights to inform and enable strategy formulation and business decision making of the senior management and the business leaders.
• Evangelize the need for analysis to drive better decisions and results.
• Conduct primary research to determine the "why" behind the numbers and to generate hypotheses for growth.
• Identify risks and conflicting practices within the scope of a project, communicate impact, and recommend alternative courses of action.
Strategy:
• Provide strategic direction to team.
• Develop, recommend, and sell insight approaches to guide strategies for internal clients.
• Increase the value and impact of deliverables by providing insight, implications and recommendations.
• Provide thought leadership and develop innovative approaches pertaining to insights and strategies.
Communication:
• Communicate and present analysis to support business recommendations to all levels of management including executive suite.
• Communicate information across departments to institutionalize learning.
• Communicate findings to business partners to inform strategic direction.
Relationship Building:
• Develop respect, trust and confidence of cross-functional partners to foster close collaboration. Manage issues and follow up on resolution.
• Inspire confidence of senior management.
• Generate awareness of capabilities to foster increased use of services.
• Build network of external resources to foster continuous improvement and upgrading of capabilities.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES As a proven business intelligence leader, the successful candidate will help build world-class business analytics, research, insight and category management capabilities. The successful candidate's responsibility will encompass all aspects of delivering value to the organization through cutting-edge development and application of research and category management tools. As such, the successful candidate will develop the information and insight structure and processes, provide day-to-day oversight of the team, build relationships at senior levels with colleagues, and proprietary approaches to generating actionable insights. Given this diverse set of responsibilities, he or she will be charged with a range of key strategic initiatives, and as such, delve into everything from identifying meaningful insights that will help to understand everything from the retail performance of individual products to the selection to emerging consumer segments to category or market share shifts.

Specific responsibilities include:
• Develop a long term and annual consumer research planning process designed to inform the strategic planning process for the North American Greeting Card Division (NAGCD).
• Transform the category management function to best-in-class practices to leverage the investment the Company is making in its data infrastructure.
• Stay current on new techniques in research and category management and adopt or adapt those they can enhance decision-making.
• Integrate data sources, including trade data, business analysis, internal data and proprietary research data, to maximize the value and impact of consumer knowledge and insight on American Greetings business.
• Be aware of trends in the greeting card industry (and related social expression category) to guide strategic planning for NAGCD.
• Provide insight oriented consumer research for business unit initiatives and corporate planning.
• Support the sales leadership team by developing research programs for key retailers/classes of trade to provide the necessary category analysis and consumer insights that will aid in the successful implementation of their goals such as account retention, prospecting and expansion. Provide category performance, secondary research, and industry and retail trends on an ad-hoc basis to all corporate divisions.
• Provide specific guidance to creative development processes of NAGCD based on analysis of creative elements of successful products.
• Develop a long-term base of knowledge of the consumer (attitudes, habits, shopping behavior) for each identified trade partner/trade class.
• Ask questions and form hypotheses that help shape and drive the insight agenda of the business.
• Help his/her organization derive deeper insights from their analyses.
• Develop strong relationships with senior management, proving insights to inform and influence key strategic decisions.

CANDIDATE PROFILE
PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES:
The successful candidate will likely have 12 - 15 years of demonstrated experience leading a market research and/or business intelligence function. This experience could be gained in a variety of environments such as in market research or information-based consulting firms or the category management or market research/analytics function within a retailer or possibly a consumer products company. Experience working within categories that have a strong fashion or emotional component are particularly relevant.
Although technically very strong in quantitative analysis, the successful candidate is by no means a typical "research/analytics type", but rather an executive in whose hands customer insight is a powerful tool that yields business results. As such, a demonstrated track record of translating data into actionable insights is critical and while recent hands-on technical expertise in the research and analytics discipline is also important, the successful candidate will skew toward a leader rather than a doer. S/he must demonstrate the aptitude for strategic business knowledge, be an analytical, yet creative thinker, skilled in leadership, data interpretation and project management.

Specific personal attributes include:

• Exceptional interpersonal skills: develops good working relationships and can operate successfully within cross-functional teams at all levels of the company.
• Demonstrated success in analyzing complex problems and ascertain solutions and methods of accomplishing the results.
• Demonstrate success in understanding and integrating business partner needs.
• Demonstrated skill in articulating business and technical issues to diverse audiences, in business terms, negotiating and influencing others to build consensus and collaborating with team members to reach solutions.
• Team Player - Highly visible within the organization with a learning orientation, collaborative approach and a "roll-sleeves-up" approach to digging in and making a difference
• Proactive Change Agent - Keenly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of his/her processes and people at all levels; and actively involved in improving both.

EDUCATIONAL REQUIREMENTS An undergraduate degree is required. A Master of Business Administration (or other related technical field) is desirable.

COMPENSATION Compensation will be competitive and commensurate with experience. It will include a base salary and an annual performance bonus.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, CONTACT
Clare Metcalf
Senior Client Partner
(312) 526-0536
clare.metcalf@kornferry.com
or
Jennifer Carroll
Client Partner
(312) 526-0581
jennifer.carroll@kornferry.com

Sears Tower
233 S Wacker Drive, Suite 3300
Chicago, IL 60606