OVERALL OBJECTIVE:
The Strategy Director 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 Strategy Director 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 Strategy Director works closely with the Research Director to ensure all research conducted on behalf of clients is effectively designed and executed.
RESPONSIBILITIES INCLUDE:
- Strategic POV’s, Comm Plans, Research Designs, including Demand and Brand Triggers
- Understand Company, Competitive, Cultural, Consumer, and Category insights
- Secondary and Syndicated research mining and analysis
- Lead a team of planners and/or planning associates as assigned.
- 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.
- Strategic direction that will contribute toward increased business and stronger marketing strategies for clients.
- 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
- Analysis of a wide range of information in great detail to gain a comprehensive context to advertising strategies including: demographics; socio-economics and the market for the client's product and market share; helping to commission research from Zimmerman and/or outside organizations
- Unearthing new cultural and social trends, and their impact on consumers' attitudes, behavior and perceptions
- Finding an 'angle' on a specific product or service on which to base an advertising campaign
- Researching the product or service, which may involve gaining technical or specific knowledge; reconciling the differences between consumers' current perceptions of the brand and the way in which the client wishes the brand to be perceived
- 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
- Presenting conclusions and ideas to clients and other agency staff
- Analyzing and interpreting customer response and sales data in order to evaluate the effectiveness of messaging and campaigns
Required Skills
REQUIREMENTS
- 7+ years of relevant experience
- Bachelor’s Degree in ideally marketing, anthropology, sociology, psychology or other social science
- Team leadership skills
- Understanding of traditional, as well as modern primary research methods
- Ability to translate research and analytics to insights
- Proven ability to manage a team
- Exceptional communication skills
- Must be able to travel both domestic and internationally as necessary
- Must be able to cover all costs associated with travel, to be reimbursed by the company in accordance with the company expense reimbursement policy
- Overall, the successful candidate will be curious, courageous, and creative in their approach to problem solving
The responsibilities are many, various, and not limited to those written in this document
Required Experience