Lead Brand Strategist

Interactive Strategies

14h•$110,000 - $130,000

About The Position

Interactive Strategies is seeking a Lead Brand Strategist to join their growing Strategy team. This role will lead the research and strategic foundation of brand engagements, including discovery, positioning, messaging, and audience insight. The Lead Brand Strategist will partner with a creative director to translate this foundation into brand and digital solutions, and extend brand strategy into how organizations present themselves across their web experience and marketing channels. The position involves working with mission-driven organizations to develop brand and digital strategies that drive results.

Requirements

10+ years of experience leading brand strategy engagements, with research as a core, hands-on part of your practice.
Demonstrated experience designing and running research — surveys, interviews, focus groups — and synthesizing findings into strategic frameworks.
Experience producing strategy documentation: personas, audience segmentation, competitive analysis, positioning frameworks, messaging architecture.
Comfort partnering with (not substituting for) creative direction — you can articulate strategic intent clearly enough for a creative team to execute against it.
Familiarity with how brand strategy connects to digital strategy — web experience and marketing channels — even if you haven't built wireframes or sitemaps yourself.
Excellent oral and written communication skills.
Experience developing client relationships and account growth strategies.

Nice To Haves

Agency experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead the research and strategy phase of engagements from discovery through recommendation, collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team.
Lead brand discovery through stakeholder interviews, workshops, and brand research.
Design and conduct user and market research — qualitative and quantitative — to uncover audience motivations, perceptions, and unmet needs.
Synthesize research into actionable strategy deliverables — audience personas, brand narratives, positioning frameworks, value propositions, and messaging strategy — grounded in evidence, not intuition.
Define brand platforms (mission, vision, values, personality, messaging hierarchy) and partner with a creative director to translate that definition into visual and verbal expression.
Extend brand strategy into digital strategy — providing strategic direction and input on web experience and marketing initiatives, in partnership with UX, content, and creative teams who own execution.
Serve as the strategic throughline across an engagement — ensuring creative and digital solutions stay grounded in the research and positioning that informed them.
Bring new approaches to research and strategy, including how AI and data-informed methods can sharpen insight and speed synthesis.
Build strong, collaborative client relationships — facilitating workshops, presenting findings, and guiding decisions with clarity and confidence.
Contribute to business development by helping shape strategy-related proposals, approaches, and new offerings.
Continuously improve our research and strategy process.