Brand Lead (Man Matters)

Brand Lead, Man Matters

Planning and Activation

• Copy: Copywriter
• Social: Social Media Lead with 2 executives (Instagram, YouTube)
• Content : Performance Marketing Content Head + Editors and Production team
• Design: graphic design and motion design head + team
• Organic : Lead responsible for SEO, PR and other organic initiatives

Why this role exists

What you will own

1. The brand thought, set top down

2. Distinctive brand assets

• Build. Identify what we already have that is worth investing behind, kill what is generic, and commission what is missing. Assets are chosen on how easily they can be made famous, not on how much the room likes them.
• Codify. Rules for use, tight enough that the brand survives being executed by four different agencies and a social team.
• Defend and repeat. Distinctive assets only pay off through relentless repetition over years. Your hardest job will be saying no to the refresh, the seasonal variant and the clever one-off, including when the request comes from leadership. Boredom inside the building is the price of recognition outside it.

3. Brand consistency across every touchpoint

4. A live consumer and cultural pulse

5. Brand campaigns, planned and shipped

What good looks like at 12 months

• Anyone in the company can tell you what the brand stands for, and they all give the same answer.
• Our distinctive assets are measurably better recognised and better attributed than they were on day one, and they appear consistently across owned, earned and paid.
• Every brief that went out that year traces back to the brand thought, and you can show the line.
• Every campaign in the calendar shipped on its committed date.
• A named list of business decisions across product, packaging, pricing and communication that changed because of an insight you surfaced.
• At least one of those decisions came from a cultural read rather than from our own data, and would not have happened otherwise.
• Brand metrics moving in the right direction, with the reasons understood rather than guessed at.
• The design and social team running on a working intake system, with brand work no longer the first thing bumped when other demand spikes.
• Teams outside your reporting line, including influencer and performance, producing work that is recognisably Man Matters without you having to police it.
• Your team producing work you no longer have to rewrite.

Who you are

• 8 to 12 years across brand strategy or planning and brand management. The strongest fit has done both sides: agency planning or strategy for the insight muscle, brand side for the ownership and operating discipline.
• You have run a campaign end to end, including the unglamorous parts: production timelines, vendor management, legal and regulatory review, budget reconciliation.
• You have run a team that includes designers, and you know how to hold creative quality without being the person doing the work.
• You have held a brand standard across teams you did not manage, and you can describe how you got them to comply without authority.
• You read Indian male culture natively. You can name what is shifting in how men in their twenties and thirties talk about their bodies, their work and their appearance, and you can say where you think it goes next.
• You are genuinely curious about people. You would rather sit with twenty consultation transcripts than read a deck about them.
• You have a real point of view and you bring it early, with evidence behind it. Once a decision is made you commit fully, including when it went the other way.
• Detail closure is a strength you keep, not something you delegate.
• You are comfortable where the answer is often unwritten and the first draft is yours to write.

What this role is not

• Not a pure strategy role. Roughly half the week is execution, review and unblocking.
• Not a social media manager role scaled up. If insight and positioning are not the part you find interesting, this will not suit you.
• Not a performance marketing role. You do not own the media plan, the budget allocation or the channel strategy.
• Not a full P&L role on day one. You run campaign spend against an agreed envelope. The brand budget line sits with the GM initially and transfers against a condition we will write down before you accept.