About the employer brand & role:

They build purposeful brands with soul and substance. Over the last decade, we’ve partnered with businesses across industries to shape brands that are distinctive, meaningful and built for the future. They are looking for a Director of Strategy to lead the strategic practice at the studio - someone who can find clarity in complexity, uncover the human and cultural truths that matter, and turn them into powerful foundations for brands.

In this role, you’ll drive brand strategy expertise across key projects, build trusted relationships with founders and leadership teams, and work closely with design and copy to translate thinking into compelling brand worlds. You’ll also shape the quality, culture and future of strategy in developing the team, strengthening our perspective and helping us grow.

Responsibilities:

Lead Brand Strategy

- Lead brand strategy engagements from discovery, consumer research, insight mining through strategic definition and creative translation, across different clients from different industries.
- Develop brand purpose, positioning, architecture, audience personas, brand personas and brand DNA to give brands a compelling position in categories and consumer culture.
- Distill large amounts of business, consumer and cultural information into clear, original and actionable strategic pathways.
- Mentor strategists to deliver sharper outcomes.
- Develop compelling creative briefs that enable standout visual and verbal brand identities.
- Ensure every strategy is rigorous for the client brief and inspiring for the creative team as well.

Lead Research & Facilitation

- Design research approaches across stakeholder, consumer, category and cultural inquiry.
- Conduct senior stakeholder interviews and draw out the tensions, ambitions and beliefs that can shape a brand.
- Plan and facilitate workshops that create clarity, alignment and meaningful participation with brand teams.
- Lead qualitative research, culture research and category research engagements with clear methodology and frameworks.
- Turn research into sharp insights and opportunity directions.

Shape Creative Outcomes

- Write inspiring creative briefs that give designers and writers a distinctive springboard for brand design.
- Partner closely with creative leaders throughout identity, verbal identity, packaging, and communication assets.
- Help build integrated brand worlds where strategy, language and design reinforce one another.

Build Trusted Client Relationships

- Become a trusted strategic partner to founders, leadership teams and marketing heads.
- Lead senior client conversations with clarity, conviction and empathy.




- Navigate differing perspectives, challenge assumptions constructively and guide teams towards decisive choices.
- Present complex thinking in a way that feels compelling, accessible and commercially relevant.

Mentor strategic thinking

- Set a high bar for the quality, originality and usefulness of the studio’s strategic work.
- Guide, review and strengthen the work of strategists across projects.
- Mentor the team by building their confidence, judgment, curiosity and individual points of view.
- Develop stronger tools, methods and intellectual property for the practice.
- Build a culture of generous critique, deep inquiry and continuous learning.

Contribute to Studio Growth

- Partner with the founders and senior leadership on new-business
- conversations, evaluating strategy proposals and key studio decisions.
- Identify opportunities to evolve our strategic offerings and create greater value for clients
- Contribute to Thought Over Design’s external point of view through case studies and thought leadership.
- Help shape the reputation and future direction of the studio.

What you bring:

- Clarity of Thought: You can take something sprawling, ambiguous or contradictory and find the sharp idea at its centre. Ideas that will build generational brands of today and tomorrow.
- Strategic Depth: You connect business ambition with human behaviour, culture and creativity. Your thinking goes beyond frameworks and category conventions.
- Cultural Curiosity: You can read culture at every depth from the meme, micro-trend or pop-culture moment moving through feeds today to the deeper shifts in identity, aspiration and behaviour beneath it and translate both into meaningful brand advantage.
- Creative Instinct: You understand what makes a brief fertile for exciting visual and tonal translations. Your strategies are not just boardroom deliverables butcreate clear, fresh possibilities for design translations.
- Leadership & Judgment: You know when to direct, when to question and when to create space for others. You can raise the quality of work while supporting the people making it.
- Client Confidence: You can build trust with senior stakeholders, facilitate difficult conversations and make a persuasive case for bold decisions.
- Craft & Precision:



You care deeply about the quality of thinking, writing and presentation and believe in setting new standards for the same.
- An Independent Point of View: You bring opinions, interests and references of your own, and remain open enough to let them evolve.

What they are looking for:

- 10+ years of experience in brand strategy, ideally within a brand, design or creative consultancy.
- Significant experience leading brand positioning, purpose, portfolio, naming or identity-led engagements.
- A body of work demonstrating command on research and strategy briefs with strong synthesis, articulation and the ability to influence creative outcomes.
- Experience advising founders, senior leadership teams and marketing decision-makers.
- Strong brand workshop design, facilitation, writing, storytelling and presentation skills.
- Experience leading and developing strategists across levels.
- A nuanced understanding of Indian consumers, culture and the changing business landscape.
- The ability to move comfortably between hands-on project work and team leadership.
- Experience contributing to pitches and new-business conversations.

What they offer:

- Direct access to founders and next-generation businesses shaping India’s brandscape.
- The opportunity to lead and evolve the strategy practice of a design studio of high repute, with a sought-after client base.
- A seat at the table in important creative, business and studio decisions.
- Close collaboration with talented designers, writers, strategists and creative leaders.
- Diverse, consequential projects across industries, growth stages and brand challenges.
- A culture that values depth over jargon, curiosity over convention and solid ideas over easy answers.
- The freedom to shape not only the work, but also how the studio thinks, learns and grows.
- A beautiful workspace in Fort, South Mumbai, with a people-first culture that thrives with collaboration.

About WinnerBrands: At WinnerBrands, we are on a mission to create a community of the brightest marketing minds to deliver impactful, rewarding, and purposeful work by collaborating, contributing & co-learning with smart peers. Backed by Busybeebrands.com, a pioneering brand-building firm that has helped some of the most disruptive new-age brands in the country craft their brand and marketing strategy, we find opportunities with progressives startups and brands in the domain of marketing with multiple engagement models for our talent partners, freelance / part-time or full-time. Request to visit our community page at https://www.winnerbrands.in/talentcommunity/

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📌 Director of Strategy | A leading new-age agency building a new generation of challenger brands in India (Mumbai)
🏢 WinnerBrands
📍 Mumbai