Brand Strategist, Channel + Partner
Job Summary
Marcom team delivers world-class, consumer-facing marketing across all platforms, ensuring engaging and inspiring experiences for our global customers. We are seeking a Senior Brand Strategist to join our Channel + Partner Strategy team.
This role is specifically focused on growing Services (including Music, TV, Pay, and iCloud) within global partner marketing, advertising, and customer experiences.
This requires a deep understanding of brand and business opportunities within and with our partners, along with a focus on customer needs, to develop mutually successful initiatives.
Description
This highly cross-functional role demands close collaboration with Channel, Partner Communications, Services, Brand, Creative, Interactive, and Sales teams, as well as key external partners. You will be instrumental in driving innovative, effective, and world-class work that solves complex marketing and business challenges for our Services business.
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop insightful, data-backed, and rigorous creative briefs that inspire outstanding work for services in partner channels.
- Lead strategic conversations and workshops (internal and external) to align diverse perspectives, identify strategic opportunities, and foster new thinking in how we communicate.
- Conduct comprehensive research, gather critical insights, and leverage data and analytics to inform strategies, define clear business and brand goals, and establish robust KPIs and measurement frameworks.
- Build and maintain strong, influential relationships with diverse senior internal and external stakeholders, ensuring alignment on marketing objectives and proof points.
- Evolve and implement scalable frameworks that unify individual initiatives within a coherent ambition for services in partner channels.
- Support and shape strategies expressed through the full marketing spectrum: content, campaigns, online experience, e-commerce, advertising, media, social, in-store, and CRM.
Minimum Qualifications
- A minimum of 10 years of progressive strategic planning experience at a creative agency or creatively-driven internal marketing team, preferably for a global brand.
- Profound understanding of current full-funnel brand, marketing, and customer experience approaches, including digital and traditional, with a proven track record of translating business and marketing objectives into effective customer-facing solutions.
- Demonstrated expertise in business and brand strategy, consumer insights and research, data analytics, and comprehensive communications planning, including a strong grasp of organic marketing (owned + earned media).
- Exceptional communication skills, encompassing clear and actionable brief writing, compelling visual storytelling (Keynote proficiency preferred), and persuasive presentation to diverse audiences.
- Strong strategic acumen with the ability to connect disparate ideas, identify optimal pathways amidst complexity, and challenge the status status quo.
- An entrepreneurial spirit, keen sense of culture, creativity, and innovation, with a continuous drive to explore and pursue new opportunities.
- Proven capability to create clarity and alignment among senior and cross-functional team members, both within and with external partner organizations.
- Global experience, coupled with the ability to identify and leverage insights across diverse markets.
Education
- Bachelor's Degree preferred.
Additional Requirements
- Creative Agency experience preferred.
- Samples of creative briefs or case study samples may be required upon request.
Hours may fluctuate based on project needs.
