VP, Strategic Intelligence

As VP of Strategic Intelligence, you are responsible for providing clients solutions grounded in data and a clear business case that can shape some of their biggest, most complex decisions to drive brand and business growth. These are the types of decisions we influence:  

• Establishing target audiences and what matters most to them  

• Brand refreshes and reboots to meet shifts in market and culture  

• Shaping marketing communications and content to attract and keep consumers for life 

• Defining innovation priorities and next products and services for launch   

• Identifying new categories to enter, where to enter and how to win 

• Creating portfolio strategies to maximize reach, sell-in story effectiveness, and thought leader positioning  

RESPONSIBILITIES:  

The individual in this role should be viewed by agency leadership, peers, and clients as a true business partner, and seller-doer, capable of driving the following:  

1. Shape Go-to-Market Strategy: working closely with CSO, EVP Intelligence, and additional Strategy leaders and departments, own positioning, pursue thought leadership opportunities, and influence how offering is marketed and communicated. 

1. Drive Growth: listens for client business needs; guides client conversations to arrive at clear definition of opportunity, ask, and objectives; provides point of view on best, custom methodology; takes lead on building effective proposals; and walks clients through them for effective selling-in.   

1. Deliver Excellence: leads individual engagements, ensuring connection back to original proposal objectives, navigating ambiguity, aligning project teams to specific responsibilities, and raising bar for work caliber.   

1. Optimize Capabilities: continuously looks for ways to maintain competitive advantage, pushing on deliverable frameworks, recommending potential new IP, and identifying latest relevant market and consumer trends.  

1. Ensure Agency Integration: seeks out opportunities to provide Strategic Intelligence capabilities to agency-of-record clients and works with other agency departments beyond Strategy (Client Experience, Project Management, Media, Creative, Design) to deliver engagements and identify opportunities for follow-on work.  

1. Mentor Team Members: builds team member capabilities and confidence to contribute to strategic intelligence initiative, both through course of daily work as well as by contributing to internal trainings. 

QUALIFICATIONS: 

• Bachelor’s degree from a four-year college; MBA degree a plus  

• 10+ years work experience, including fieldwork in quantitative and qualitative insights   

• Experience working for an insights firm, brand strategy, innovation shop, or management consulting firm strongly desired; experience with an in-house role a plus   

• Ability to lead creation of research tools (surveys, screeners, discussion guides), experience leading segmentations, customer journeys, MaxDiff and conjoint studies a plus  

• Ability to read, analyze and interpret information from a variety of sources, such as trade journals, research reports, white papers and cross-tabulated survey data  

• Ability to draft reports, presentations, white papers and general business correspondences with a compelling storyline tied to clear implications   

• Ability to effectively present results to customers, clients and other employees of the organization   

• Excellent reasoning ability: Ability to define problems, collect information, establish facts and draw conclusions based upon information furnished in written, oral or diagram form.  

• Experience synthesizing and communicating market and customer or consumer trends; ensures relevant trends are acted upon in business growth, brand, product and marketing strategies  

• Manages time efficiently to monitor and execute project components, including meeting documents, survey instruments and data analysis for multiple projects at a time.  

• Experience moderating focus groups, IDIs and ethnographies a plus