Director, Brand Strategy - Zimmerman Advertising, Inc

The Director, Brand Strategy plays a vital role in developing business solutions and marketing campaigns for a range of products and services. This position’s role is to combine the attitudes and interests of consumers, clients and creatives to help produce effective creative solutions and executions. Acting as strategic authority within an agency, the Director, Brand Strategy uses expertise, experience and judgment, research and analytics to formulate critical insights. These include identification of ideal audiences, optimum methods of communication, compelling messaging and the like. They combine market data, qualitative and quantitative research (both primary and secondary) and product knowledge within a core proposition to enable creative and other teams to produce marketing ideas that address defined business problems. With increasing public awareness of marketing strategies, a key challenge is to develop innovative ways to reach consumers. The Director, Brand Strategy works closely with the Research Director to ensure all research conducted on behalf of clients is effectively designed and executed.

Responsibilities:

• Understand Company, Competitive, Cultural, Consumer, and Category insights
• Secondary and Syndicated research mining and analysis
• Analyzing competitive research (secondary, qualitative and quantitative), analytics and trend analysis
• Collaboration with Strategy & Analytics teams to develop business, marketing and communication strategies that are fueled by customer insight.
• Brand positioning development and creative insight resulting in communications that resonate with target audiences
• Monitoring and interpretation of cultural and social trends relative to the clients’ businesses
• Meeting the client or prospect to learn the background to the brand and advising on possible approaches or adaptation of approach to the target market
• Providing the creative team with a clearly defined brief that contains concise information on the product, audience and strategy enabling them to develop creative ideas that may be applied to a variety of media channels that will promote the idea most effectively
• Analyzing and interpreting customer response and sales data in order to evaluate the effectiveness of messaging and campaigns

Qualifications:

• Education and experience equivalent to a Bachelor's degree in English, marketing, anthropology, sociology, psychology or other social science; supplemented with strategic planning, research and study design experience.
• 5-7+ years of relevant experience
• Must have Advertising and/or Marketing Agency experience
• Advertising, Media, Creative Marketing Industry experience is highly preferred
• Team leadership skills
• Understanding of traditional, as well as modern primary research methods
• Ability to translate research and analytics to insights
• Exceptional communication skills
• Must be able to travel both domestic and internationally as necessary
• Overall, the successful candidate will be curious and creative in their approach to problem solving