Strategy Director at Brand Union

Job description

A senior manager and consultant who lead the strategy practice and manages the JHB strategy team. Is responsible for growing the Strategy capability and working with the MD to build the reputation of Brand Union as a strategic brand consultancy.

Key Responsibilities & Accountabilities

• Strategy
• Develop and communicate ground-breaking and effective branding strategies and concepts
• Champion of our brand philosophy and ideas within the agency and to clients
• Take a ‘brand-led’ perspective on the engagement challenge and also be comfortable working across discipline
• Help monitor and improve the quality of strategic output of the agency
• Facilitates senior executive workshops and meetings, and presents at Board level
• Assists in new business opportunities and initial scoping and pitch presentations/strategy
• Creativity
• Develop game-changing creative ideas and briefs to transform client brands and businesses
• Work with Creative Directors and Client Directors to ensure a high quality of output
• Thought Leadership
• Lead the development of the BU strategy offer in collaboration with the Cape Town Strategy Director
• Write regularly to demonstrate leadership – white papers, press articles, etc, supporting marketing and PR
• Share knowledge and insights through knowledge sharing and best practice case studies and deploy new tools and methodologies
• Stay abreast of latest published thinking on branding, market based trends, brand successes, failures and industry business activity (mergers, acquisitions, opportunities)
• Relationships
• Senior client contact point who forms long term client relationships and seeks opportunities to develop farming initiatives
• Ensure regular upward communication to Exec Strategy Director and other management
• Management
• Guide, motivate, mentor and direct team members ensuring their performance and development are managed using the performance review process
• Manage large multi-faceted projects. Monitor time and budget expenditure to ensure programmes remain within agreed targets and provide regular upward reports
• Facilitate internal learning and development through training and workshops (for strategy and across functions)
• Encourage learning and sharing of ideas across the network
• Role-specific professional and technical skills
• Sophisticated understanding of all branding deliverables and associated disciplines such as positioning, architecture, messaging, segmentation, research, engagement and interaction
• Ability to grow, engage and maintain critical client and internal relationships
• Able to persuasively present and discuss at CEO/Executive/Board level and to build consensus around a brand concept within client organizations
• Proven ability to manage, grow and deploy resources
• Appreciation of chargeability and how this links to agency profitability
• High level networking ability
• Strong business writing skills

Level of experience

• Extensive experience in similar role client or agency or client side marketing
• Brand strategy and design experience essential
• Demonstrated leadership and ability to grow client business in another agency environment
• Proven people management skills and leadership experience
• Educated to degree level or equivalent

Job Behaviours

These are the behaviours expected for this role:

• Leading from the front: Champion positive change by creating a sense of direction and purpose for your team. Encouraging a sense of mutual responsibility and encouraging high performance.
• Being a mentor: Continually looking to improve, monitor and plan around individual performance within the group account by building their skills and strengths, and teaching the team how to overcome their weaknesses for optimum career development.
• Showing interest: Express interest in your team’s well being from a career and personal perspective ensuring that you understand personal diversity which influence their opinions, circumstances and emotional well being.
• Work with agility: Being able to adapt your approach and leadership style to best suit the situation at hand, and ensuring a timely response.
• Continually learning: Encourage group account and personal learning. Group account and category knowledge is essential in this role with regards to the business strategy and imperatives. Keep learning and developing new skills and trends by participate in professional seminars, reading relevant research and insights, doing own desktop research.
• Effective communication: Persuade and influence others using logic and reason. Negotiation your way to find and express solutions for broad and complex issues.
• Client centric views: Ensuring that all decisions and executions are based around building a lasting partnership with the client and taking personal responsibility for improving and correcting customer service problems and eliminate underlying problems. Take extraordinary steps to retain and grow these relationships.
• Collaborating: Develop a relationship with key stakeholders (Client Service Director and Exco) to achieve common goals for the agency (policy, process, methodology, targets).
• Fair in response: In all you do, be fair and honest with regards to appraisals, assessments and making team members accountable for their performance. Encourage other’s ideas and views.