Director Brand Marketing

Own the meaning, voice, and long-term equity of STAGE for 20M+ users across 15+ regional languages master brand and child brands — including every audio, visual, and brand touchpoint where STAGE shows up. Build a brand that scales nationally without losing cultural depth or authenticity.

Location: Noida, STAGE HQ

Company: STAGE OTT

Reports to: CEO

What You Will Own (Non-Negotiable)

This role owns brand meaning and the full brand expression system — not just marketing output. There is no separate Product function to hand brand experience to. You own brand positioning and narrative and how STAGE shows up across the brand experience surfaces you govern.

Brand OWNS all audio, visual, and every brand touchpoint, including:

The creative system and brand guidelines (visual identity, motion, sound/audio identity, copy standards, cultural representation)

In-app chrome and onboarding feel — how STAGE looks, sounds, and feels from first open through everyday use

Social and brand storytelling — brand social handles, earned narrative, cultural moments, PR posture

Launch creative and brand-led campaign ideas for flagship titles and cultural moments

Final brand sign-off on creative that carries the STAGE identity — including paid creative that must stay inside your guardrails

You are the final authority on:

STAGE’s positioning, narrative, and master brand architecture

Brand tone, voice, and cultural posture across markets

Creative governance and brand guardrails — audio, visual, and copy — across all channels

All earned media — brand social handles, PR, cultural moments, and public narrative — end to end

What the brand amplifies publicly, and what it deliberately stays silent on

How STAGE’s brand shows up in brand experience surfaces (in-app chrome, onboarding feel, marketing surfaces, content communication, partnerships)

Your mandate is one unified role: Brand Strategy & Positioning + Creative System (Audio/Visual/Touchpoints) + Earned Media & Brand Voice + Integrated Brand Campaigns + Brand Experience Surfaces + AI-Native Brand Discipline + Cross-Functional Leadership.

Scorecard (KPI Spine)

Brand health — awareness, consideration, and affinity (tracked with clear baselines and directional movement)

Branded search + direct/organic demand share — evidence that brand is pulling demand, not only paid is buying it

Creative / brand-system adherence — consistency of text, audio, visual, and voice against the system you own

Brand-led launch contribution to title viewing — shared outcome with Content/Growth; Brand owns the brand idea and creative quality of the launch

Quality of brand / earned moments — cultural relevance, share of voice quality, and restraint (what we amplify vs. stay silent on)

The Mission

STAGE is an Entertainment Platform for India’s Regional Cultures.

We exist to celebrate, represent, and elevate the stories, emotions, and identities that define India — across regions, communities, and cultural worlds that mainstream entertainment has historically underrepresented.

Our content is rooted in specific regional cultures; the brand itself must feel cohesive, contemporary, and emotionally consistent across markets. Without a brand custodian, “brand” becomes whatever each campaign or launch decides it is that week — and short-term growth tactics can quietly erode the trust and meaning that make STAGE more than another regional app.

We are looking for a Brand Custodian with Extreme Ownership — someone who owns the meaning, voice, and long-term equity of STAGE across the master brand and its child brands, and who treats every brand touchpoint (audio, visual, in-app, onboarding, social, launch) as part of the mandate, not a request list for another function. You will run a lean, AI-native leadership seat: clear priorities, cultural judgment that doesn’t flatten nuance, and no handoff of brand meaning to agencies or adjacent teams.

Why This Role Exists Now

STAGE is scaling across regions and content verticals fast enough that brand risks becoming fragmented — with no one accountable for a single, coherent brand truth across audio, visual, and product surfaces.

As the master brand spawns child brands and enters new regional cultures, there is real risk of either flattening cultural nuance into generic pan-India messaging, or fragmenting into disconnected regional identities with no shared spine.

Performance marketing optimizes hard for CAC — necessary — but without a brand custodian, short-term growth tactics can quietly erode trust and meaning. Brand must hold the line on identity without owning Growth’s efficiency metrics.

STAGE’s earned media and cultural presence today is too often reactive rather than authored — there is no clear owner deciding what the brand stands for publicly, and what it deliberately stays silent on.

Generative AI is collapsing the cost and time of producing creative, copy, and localized content at scale — without brand rules, that speed produces more content, not more meaning, and risks flattening regional nuance into generic AI-output sameness.

Key Responsibilities

1. Brand Strategy & Positioning (The North Star)





Define and evolve STAGE’s core brand positioning as a platform for India’s regional cultures.

Own the master brand architecture — ensuring diverse regional stories, IPs, and markets ladder up to a single, strong brand truth.

Create and protect the “red thread” connecting different regional cultures without flattening, stereotyping, or diluting them.

Define brand tenets, tone of voice, and storytelling philosophy; act as final brand gatekeeper across brand experience surfaces, marketing, content communication, and partnerships.

2. Creative System — Text, Audio, Visual & Every Touchpoint

Own the STAGE creative system end-to-end: visual identity, motion, sound/audio identity, copy standards, and representation rules.

Own in-app chrome and onboarding feel so brand meaning is lived in the product, not only in campaigns. Engineering implements; you set the brand priorities on those surfaces. There is no separate Product org holding final say on brand experience in your domain.

Own social/brand storytelling and launch creative quality for brand-led moments; partner with Content so title launches carry a coherent brand idea.

Set and publish brand guidelines that other functions can use without waiting on you for every creative call.

3. Earned Media & Brand Voice (The Voice of STAGE)

Own all earned media: core brand social handles, PR, media narratives, cultural moments, and community presence.

Act as Editor-in-Chief of STAGE’s brand voice — culturally aware, confident, contemporary — turning content into conversations and cultural relevance, not a promotional feed.

Define what STAGE engages with publicly, and what it deliberately stays silent on.

Build STAGE’s cultural presence as authored strategy, not reactive posting.

4. Integrated Brand Campaigns (360 Thinking)

Lead brand strategy for flagship show launches, entry into current regional cultures, and major national/cultural moments — each with a strong central idea, emotional clarity, and the ability to scale across Paid, Owned, and Earned.

Partner closely with Growth so brand equity strengthens long-term demand quality, and short-term growth tactics never erode trust or meaning — within the Brand vs Growth boundary above.

Ensure every major brand campaign has a clear equity thesis, not only a launch calendar. Brand-led launch contribution to title viewing is a shared outcome — not sole Brand ownership of viewing or CAC.

5. Creative Governance & Growth Partnership

Set the creative bar for STAGE and hold internal teams and agencies to it — respectful, non-tokenistic representation; zero brand dilution.

Build brand guardrails that protect meaning without strangling creativity or slowing Growth’s paid creative testing velocity unnecessarily.

Own the brand side of creative governance for paid acquisition creative: Growth tests and scales within your guardrails; you set and enforce those guardrails. You do not own CAC, ROAS, or paid efficiency.

On paywall: provide visual/brand sign-off on look-and-feel; Growth owns conversion, pricing, and checkout experiments.

6. Cross-Functional Influence

Work deeply with Content (how stories are positioned and marketed), Growth (brand–growth alignment within clear boundaries), and Retention/CRM (brand consistency beyond acquisition).

Act as the brand conscience of the company — calling out dilution, inconsistency, or short-termism when it happens, not after it’s shipped.

Partner with Growth and Retention so acquisition and lifecycle surfaces stay on-brand without you owning paywall conversion, pricing, or CRM channels.

7. Building Brand in an AI-Native World

Set the rules for how generative AI tools and agents are used in brand and creative production — where AI accelerates output (localization across 15+ languages, first-draft copy, asset variants) and where human judgment must stay non-negotiable (cultural nuance, emotional authenticity, anything representing a specific regional identity).

Build guardrails against AI-generated content that flattens cultural specificity into generic, stereotyped, or “algorithm-safe” representation.

Use AI-powered social listening and trend detection to keep STAGE’s earned media culturally current — without letting automation dictate brand voice or public stance.

Bring a clear point of view on how AI changes the brand function’s shape — where a smaller, faster, AI-augmented team can do what used to require a larger agency retainer, and where that trade-off would cost STAGE authenticity if pushed too far.

8. Team Building & Brand Leadership

Build and lead a lean, high-agency brand and creative collaboration model — impact from taste and judgment, not headcount.

Foster an AI-first mindset across brand work — agents and automation embraced where they accelerate quality output, resisted where they flatten culture.

Mentor collaborators to think like owners of brand equity, not calendar managers.

Who You Are





You have a deep, intuitive understanding of Indian regional cultures — and the taste to represent them without stereotyping.

You are a storyteller and brand strategist, not just a campaign planner.

You are social-native but brand-first: you understand how brands are built in feeds, comments, and communities, but sustained through meaning.

You are strategic and hands-on; comfortable taking a point of view and defending it with clarity and conviction.

You practice extreme ownership — if brand shows up inconsistently in product or marketing surfaces you govern, you fix it, you don’t file endless requests.

You see brand and performance as a relationship to manage actively, not opposing camps — and you never confuse brand ownership with owning Growth’s CAC or conversion math.

You have earned respect through judgment and results, not title alone.

Requirements

Experience: 10+ years in Brand Marketing, Brand Strategy, Creative Strategy, or Brand Leadership roles, with experience building or scaling consumer-facing brands (media, entertainment, culture-led, or internet brands preferred).

Proven ownership of

Brand positioning and long-term brand platforms or narratives — not limited to campaign execution A full creative system — visual, and ideally audio — with guidelines others can execute against

Earned media end-to-end — social brand voice, PR, cultural moments

Creative governance and brand guardrails across teams and agencies

Culture-led or content-led brand campaigns with measurable brand-health / equity outcomes

Cross-functional influence with Growth/Performance without owning media buying or CAC

Must-have experience:

Brand Positioning Ownership — prior ownership of brand positioning and narrative architecture, not only campaign execution

Creative System Ownership — has owned visual (and preferably audio) identity systems and brand guidelines at scale

Earned Media Judgment — has handled brand social, PR, or cultural moments with restraint and taste

Fluent Hindi — required for voice, nuance, and cultural judgment across STAGE’s core markets

Creative Governance — has set and enforced creative standards across internal teams and/or agencies

Lean Impact — comfort operating without a large team or budget; impact from taste and judgment, not headcount

Brand–Performance Partnership — a clear point of view on how brand and performance coexist without Brand owning CAC/ROAS or Growth owning brand meaning

AI-Native Brand Craft — hands-on experience using generative AI tools or agents in creative/content production, with a clear-eyed view of where they help and where they risk authenticity

Cultural Curiosity — genuine interest in regional India; exposure across regional cultural contexts preferred; fluency in Haryanvi, Rajasthani, or Bhojpuri is a plus, not required

This Role Is NOT For

Social media managers or content schedulers who are not brand strategists.

Candidates who want to own CAC, ROAS, or paywall conversion % as their primary scorecard — those sit with Growth.

People who see brand and performance as opposing forces rather than a relationship to manage.

Leaders who require a large team or budget before they can make impact.

Anyone who treats cultural representation as a checkbox rather than something to get right or not do at all.

Candidates who see AI purely as a cost-cutting or speed tool, with no point of view on where it threatens brand authenticity and cultural nuance.

Leaders who want brand-deck ownership only and expect another function to keep final say on how the brand shows up in experience surfaces they should govern.

Why This Role Matters

STAGE is not trying to become the biggest platform. We are building the most meaningful entertainment platform for India’s regional cultures.

This role will define whether STAGE becomes:

Just another regional entertainment app with interchangeable messaging, or The cultural reference point for how India sees its regional identities — with a brand that scales without losing depth.

Your work will directly impact:

Brand positioning clarity and master brand architecture

Coherence of every audio, visual, and brand touchpoint — including in-app and onboarding

Earned media quality, share of voice, and cultural relevance

Creative consistency and representation standards across markets

Long-term organic and branded demand — not Growth’s CAC ownership

Leadership confidence that brand meaning won’t be diluted week to week

Why STAGE?

Shape Culture: We are building more than an OTT; we are preserving and celebrating India’s cultural identities through entertainment in regional context. Your work will have real-world impact.

Build a Legacy: This is a career-defining opportunity to build STAGE’s brand from the ground up — positioning, creative system, voice, earned presence, and brand experience — and make regional culture feel contemporary without dilution.

Extreme Ownership: We believe in hiring the best and giving them the autonomy to succeed. You will own your function end-to-end — including the brand touchpoints tied to brand.

Unmatched Growth: Get in on the ground floor of a high-growth startup and scale with us. We offer an unlimited leave policy because we trust you to deliver.

📌 Director- Brand Marketing (Noida)
🏢 Stage Technologies
📍 Noida