Strategist, Brand Experience

Meijer•Grand Rapids, MI

About The Position

As a family company, we serve people and communities. When you work at Meijer, you’re provided with career and community opportunities centered around leadership, personal growth and development. Consider joining our family – take care of your career and your community! Meijer Rewards Weekly pay Scheduling flexibility Paid parental leave Paid education assistance Team member discount Development programs for advancement and career growth Please review the job profile below and apply today! The Brand Experience & Marketing Operations team ensures that brand strategy, category priorities, and marketing execution operate as one cohesive system across the organization. The team establishes the strategic frameworks, operational processes, and cross‑functional alignment required to deliver consistent, accurate, and customer‑centered marketing across all touchpoints. The Brand Experience Strategist supports the development of brand narratives, category storylines, and integrated briefs that guide enterprise and seasonal marketing efforts. The role gathers inputs, synthesizes insights, drafts briefs, and coordinates cross functional alignment so brand and category priorities translate cleanly into channel planning and execution. This position serves as a key driver of narrative development – ensuring clarity, consistency, and documentation across teams – while also building the strategic capability and ownership needed to lead the development of brand and category strategies. This role applies a strong customer lens, using insights, competitive trends, and business opportunities to inform briefs and storytelling that create more cohesive, omnichannel experiences for customers. This job profile is not meant to be all inclusive of the responsibilities of this position; may perform other duties as assigned or required.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or related field (required).
3-5+ years in brand strategy, category marketing, and/or integrated marketing planning required.
Experience turning insights into narratives, developing briefs, and guiding cross‑functional teams through strategic planning.
Strong writing and narrative crafting skills; clarity in distilling complex inputs into simple, actionable briefs.
Expertise in retail/category strategy and go‑to‑market planning.
Ability to influence without authority and collaborate across merchandising, marketing, creative, media and operations partners.
Strong communication and facilitation skills.
Comfortable navigating ambiguity.
Organized and detail‑oriented; maintains documentation and follow-through across multiple workstreams.
Analytical curiosity with ability to interpret performance insights and recommend iterative story improvements
Growth mindset; learns from Sr. Brand Experience Strategist and Sr. Manager, Brand Experience & Category Strategy to take on progressively larger narrative ownership.

Nice To Haves

Experience with customer‑centered marketing, category insights, or omnichannel storytelling preferred.

Responsibilities

Create integrated creative briefs for assigned initiatives; capture objectives, customer insights, message hierarchy, required deliverables and timing.
Build story maps and messaging frameworks for categories/initiatives; ensure alignment to current enterprise narratives and guardrails.
Identify inputs (merchant priorities, performance readouts, customer insights) and translate into clear recommendations that inform narratives, creative concepting and content development.
Serve as the lead strategist for assigned initiatives, driving clarity, documentation, and alignment across partners.
Partner with Brand Experience & Category Strategy, Marketing Operations, In-Store Experience, Creative, Retail Media, Digital, Own Brand, and Category Management to ensure the brief is understood and feasible; capture decisions and next steps.
Lead portions of integrated planning processes by synthesizing inputs, aligning cross‑functional partners, and shaping recommendations for timing, priority tiering, and narrative development.
Identify opportunities and propose resolutions; escalate to Sr. Brand Experience Strategist and/or Sr. Manager, Brand Experience & Category Strategy for arbitration.
Apply brand guardrails, messaging standards, and naming conventions; flag misalignments and propose adjustments.
Partner with Sr. Brand Experience Strategist to collect campaign/category learnings; draft recaps and suggest narrative refinements for future briefs.