The Brand Strategist connects the dots between human behavior, business strategy, creative development, and marketing execution. Sol Marketing is looking for a Brand Strategist to use big picture thinking, insight-gathering, and storytelling skills to develop positioning, branding, and creative recommendations for our clients.

The Brand Strategist’s role includes guiding market research, uncovering insights and “ah-hahs,” managing client expectations, and translating client needs into actionable deliverables that open new strategic territory for their businesses. Other activities include running hands-on client workshops and writing brand strategy documents. The Brand Strategist also creates simple, actionable, inspirational strategies that our creative and content teams can execute.

Successful candidates are confident, articulate, creative, and curious. You must have great instincts for human behavior, brand strategies, and marketing theories and practices. You must be able to work quickly with limited supervision. You should have a passion for branding as a practice and a deep understanding of the role of strategic branding in creating business success for our clients. You must be familiar with (but not constrained by) formal practices for developing winning brand strategies. That means that you must know not only WHAT to do, but WHY we do it. Finally, the successful strategist must be able to confidently articulate a point of view on any industry or branding problem, requiring you to be a voracious consumer of content about business, technology, marketing, and world events.

Key responsibility areas:

• Client service and strategic support – Translate client needs into actionable strategy.

• Project brief development – Listen to client needs, and connect the dots between client desires and project plans that the team can execute.

• Research and insights – Design, scope, manage, and analyze data gathered through qualitative and quantitative research processes. Manage external relationships with sample, data collection, data processing, and research platform vendors. Inform brand strategies through segmentation, customer and competitive analysis, and other research practices.

• Positioning and messaging – Use data and client inputs to develop strategic messaging platforms.

• Project management – Develop project plans, create and manage detailed strategy project timelines, and manage resources on multiple client strategy projects at one time.

• Manage strategy budgets – Assist in scoping of strategy projects, assigning and managing resources, negotiating with outside vendors, reviewing and approving vendor invoices, ensuring vendors get paid, and managing client account financials as appropriate.

• Grow the strategy offering – Assist with new business development opportunities, and identify emerging client needs on existing accounts.

• Remain ahead of the curve – Stay informed of innovations in clients’ industries and in marketing and business.

The successful candidate will:

• Have at least 2 years’ experience and a proven track record in a market research, strategist or account planning role

• Be poised and self-confident serving clients

• Be a fact-driven, creative thinker

• Be a self-starter who is comfortable with ambiguity

• Have great human and business instincts and be able to confidently articulate a well-informed point of view

• Have potential to be an indispensable “go-to” resource for clients and colleagues

• Be an analytical thinker with strong perspectives on consumer, marketing and business strategies

• Be a curious and voracious consumer of business, technology, marketing and industry-specific developments

• Be a bold communicator with strong, informed opinions

• Be familiar with the leading techniques for building brands with a strategy-first approach

• A degree in communications, advertising, brand planning, research, or business is a plus.