Senior Strategist

**Roles & Responsibilities**

As a Senior Strategist, the primary outcomes for your position fall into the following areas:
1. Strategic Thinking and Leadership
2. Project Management
3. Mentoring/Team Collaboration
**Strategic Thinking and Leadership**

Brand, design and communication plans, programs, methodologies and strategies are built and documented from consumer insights, trend work, brand and market audits, understanding of product propositions, benefits and promises and brand analysis.

This includes:

- Moderating research, facilitating creative sessions and workshops, and providing debriefs and strategic constructs
- Translating insights into strategy, deploying a variety of research and strategy tools and methods, and incorporating creative instinct, analytical and interpretative abilities, while balancing the ability to remain impartial
- Forecasting trends and creating visual toolkits
- Understanding the overall market and brand landscape

All aspects of consumer qualitative research are led; this includes:

- Identifying or developing appropriate methodologies and research tools
- Brand, packaging and market audits
- Leading/overseeing screener development to select the right respondents
- Writing discussion guides
- Overseeing stimulus development/selection
- Moderating
- Debriefing findings

Translation is championed through the guardianship of activities and environments in which focused, informed strategies, ideas and translation can be developed. Managing and learning from internal stakeholders from other disciplines and exploring possibilities and ideas together. Creating the right tools, stimulus, written and visual briefs for effective transition into creative phases of the project.
- Leading working sessions, forums and workshops for effective synthesis and ideation (internal and external)
- Championing the meaningful insights that inform the creative ideas and ensuring this does not get lost in translation.
- Clients are serviced and happy; anticipate and manage their needs and oversee projects to exceed expectations with strategic thinking, design guidance and foresight
- Business development initiatives are supported; this includes developing strategic input for proposals and accompanying the business development team in meetings, and presenting and describing the Strategy & Innovation offer; networking conferences are attended and used as an opportunity to market Marks for new business prospects
- In conjunction with the Head of Strategy & Innovation, unique strategy-related products and services are developed to build and enhance Marks’ portfolio of billable services
- Marks’ efforts to remain at the leading edge of strategic thinking is supported by staying on top of industry trends, contributing to internal and external facing think pieces that inspire and offer unique, and defendable, points of view on current hot topics
- Be a Marks ambassador; talk passionately about your role and represent the company in a positive and desirable light

**Project Management**:

- Collaborating with researchers, strategists, designers and Client Service, Strategy & Innovation projects are managed to meet or exceed timelines and budgets, including:

- Planning project phases and assignments, ensuring project deliverables are realistic
- Responding to creative briefs with Strategy & Innovation offer
- Participating in project kick-off meetings, articulating your own design and innovation ideas, ensuring adequate overlap between Strategy & Innovation and design implementation
- Creating cost estimates and managing project resources as needed.
- Working with the client and internal teams, set priorities and manage daily job tasks, ensuring on-time and on-strategy deliverables
- Track time spent against project estimates, revising project and cost estimates as necessary
- Communicating time/cost constraints to the project leads to prevent project creep
- Communicating concerns about lack of resources to the Head of Strategy & Innovation as soon as possible
- Strategy & Innovation, along with the client’s point of view, is represented by you in Project Kickoff meetings, design meetings and strategy presentation meetings
- Strategic stages of the projects are managed, including:

- Ensuring strategic goals are understood and accomplished
- Reviewing all Strategy & Innovation work to ensure Marks consistently high standards, and client brand standards are met
- Overseeing strategic material to ensure the integrity and richness of front-end work is maintained

**Mentoring/Team Collaboration**:

- Professional growth of junior employees is supported
- An environment where everyone can share a voice is created
- Collaborate and learn from fellow team members
- Seek opportunities to contribute to the success of the team
- Seek opportunities to learn new skills and earn new responsibilities within your team and Marks as an organization

**Requirements**:

- Exceptional ability to communicate with al