director, Brand Activations
About The Position
The Director, Brand Activations is a culture-marketing leader responsible for shaping how Starbucks earns relevance with existing and untapped audiences through sports, travel and hospitality partnerships, emerging culture, and new audiences. The role turns audience and cultural insights into distinctive ideas, partnerships, content, and experiences that strengthen fandom, create conversation, and deliver measurable brand and business impact. The director leads culture-marketing strategy and execution across these areas, builds and develops a high-performing team, and creates authentic strategies grounded in audience understanding, fandom, travel rituals, and emerging behaviors. The role also develops strategic partnerships and works across functions to deliver cohesive storytelling and seamless execution. It oversees the activation portfolio’s budget and performance measures, including cultural, brand, audience, and business impact. The role is onsite four days a week. Starbucks offers a range of medical, insurance, leave, retirement, stock, education, and other benefits. Compensation depends on job-related knowledge and skills, experience, location, and internal equity; no salary range is provided in the description.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in brand marketing, culture marketing, sports marketing, travel or hospitality marketing, experiential marketing, or cultural partnerships.
- Proven success leading large-scale, culturally relevant partnerships, activations, campaigns, content, and experiences.
- Deep understanding of cultural trends, fandom, audience behavior, social platforms, and the evolving media and creator landscape.
- Experience building and managing relationships with major partners, agencies, rights holders, talent, creators, or cultural institutions.
- Experience managing cross-functional teams and developing high-performing talent.
- Strong strategic thinking, storytelling, collaboration, and leadership skills.
Nice To Haves
- MBA or equivalent experience preferred.
Responsibilities
- Lead development and execution of culture-marketing strategy across sports, travel partnerships, emerging culture, and untapped audiences.
- Build and develop a team of top performers.
- Develop innovative, authentic strategies that establish Starbucks as a culturally relevant brand and reflect audience insights, fandom, travel rituals, and emerging behaviors.
- Shape Starbucks’ presence across priority sports, athletes, leagues, teams, hometown moments, cultural tentpoles, and everyday sports conversation; turn fandom insights into partnerships, content, collaborations, and experiences.
- Develop annual and seasonal activation plans for Delta and Marriott partnerships, extending beyond functional benefits into storytelling, product, merchandise, content, and experiences.
- Identify credible ways for Starbucks to participate in new cultural spaces and connect with untapped audiences, using cultural intelligence, social listening, and evolving customer behaviors.
- Build and nurture partnerships with athletes, teams, leagues, rights holders, travel and hospitality partners, creators, cultural institutions, agencies, venues, and other collaborators.
- Drive cross-functional collaboration with marketing, Studio, PR, social, media, loyalty, product, partnerships, retail, and operations teams.
- Oversee the activation portfolio budget and performance metrics, setting objectives and measures for cultural, brand, audience, and business impact.
- Inspire and mentor a high-performing team, fostering creativity, cultural fluency, innovation, collaboration, and audience understanding.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
- Basic and supplemental life insurance and other voluntary insurance benefits.
- Short-term and long-term disability.
- Paid parental leave and family expansion reimbursement.
- Paid vacation from date of hire and accrued sick time.
- Eight paid holidays and two personal days per year.
- Eligible participation in a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
- Discounted company stock program (S.I.P.) and Starbucks equity program (Bean Stock).
- Incentivized emergency savings and financial well-being tools.
- 100% upfront tuition coverage for a first-time bachelor’s degree through Arizona State University’s online program via the Starbucks College Achievement Plan.
- Student loan management resources and access to other educational opportunities.
- Backup care and DACA reimbursement.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
