Brand Strategy Manager
The Brand Strategy Manager will help drive and elevate foundational brand strategy work across a diverse portfolio of brands within Land O’ Lakes. The role will oversee and help lead brand planning, including architecture, positioning, assessment and foundational brand strategy work, as well as trend forecasting and customer journey/experience work. This role will ensure that all work is grounded in consumer/customer insights. In addition, continue to elevate our brand planning thinking and create thought-leadership on key topics.

DESIRED EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent advertising agency experience.
• 12+ years of overall marketing experience with 8+ years’ experience with Brand Planner, Creative Strategist, Consumer Insights/Researcher, or related in an agency, research firm or similar environment.
• Strong verbal skills, strong writing skills, and excellent interpersonal relationship building skills
• Strong story telling skills – deck writing, user stories – develop a narrative and amplify with visuals and data; ability to translate brand strategies to paid/earned/owned activations.
• Experience working in cross-disciplinary teams
• Experienced in balancing multiple projects and tight deadlines, collaborating deeply with people from multiple disciplines along the way
• Experienced working on CPG and/or agriculture brands
  The salary range on this role is $120,880 - $181,320

• Insight development: Lead and collaborate with cross-functional partners and leaders on consumer data, trends and culture, brand/market research to synthesize learnings and derive insight that moves our brands forward and grows our business. Ensure successful insights projects with cross-functional internal teams, vendors and agencies and set the standard for insight development and impact.
• Brand Planning: Lead, build and communicate our long-term, foundational brand strategy and brand planning work. Build the toolkit for the broader marketing organization adoption and utilization. Work collaboratively to build buy-in and successfully navigate a highly matrixed environment.
• Research: In partnership with internal and external partners, lead the analysis of industry trends, competitive positioning, and consumer needs and behavior to understand our brands’ consumer/customer and cultural landscape.
• Messaging: Lead and develop foundational brand messaging documents and work with cross-functional teams to ensure that messaging is relevant and consumer-first.
• Trend Forecasting: Steer and continue to scale our internal trend practice, monitoring cultural/consumer change and creating demand for our trend research. Continue to find new ways to connect dots and share our trend reporting to bring outside thinking into the organization.
• Customer Journey/Customer Experience Development: Lead cross-functional teams to deliver consumer/customer-first customer experience and journey mapping. Facilitate integrated sessions/workshops, develop foundational tools, and map and deliver on modern customer journeys/experiences.
• Storytelling: Help tell great stories and share our successes with internal and external audiences. Communicate and cultivate impactful stories using writing, visuals, and verbal communication such as personas, customer stories, videos, and other tools.
• People Management: Previous people management skills required. This role will manage a group of three internal strategists, as well as own the agency and vendor relationship.