Brand Lead

What you’ll learn & achieve:

UL is looking for a Brand Lead to join our Brand Activation team, reporting to the Senior Director, Brand Activation. UL’s Brand Team leads the development and implementation of the external brand strategy and brand experience across UL’s enterprise and oversees global brand governance. Ultimately, the team is responsible for taking brand defining initiatives and devising the strategy to turn them into revenue producing or brand enhancing tactics.

The Brand Lead is a passionate brand builder, strategic thinker, and proven B2B professional with experience in brand-building, brand management and/or governance. This role will lead enterprise efforts to design, build, and manage a best-in-class global brand management function within UL’s Brand Team. The Brand Lead will drive management and governance of the UL brand across teams and touchpoints, bringing our brand strategy to life and empowering employees to become effective brand champions. The ideal candidate will be entrepreneurial and resourceful self-starter, and an excellent communicator driven by a genuine curiosity and passion for building brands that people love.

Job responsibilities:

Brand Equity:

• Drive brand excellence to help sustain and increase UL’s brand equity.

Governance:

• Strategize, identify, implement, and maintain all tools, resources, and internal comms channels to drive ongoing employee and partner (e.g. agencies) awareness, engagement, and understanding of the UL brand, including the brand guidelines hub, brand onboarding modules, training videos, etc. 
• Manage the development and socialization of brand guidelines, standards and corporate design systems to ensure brand assets and tools keep pace with business needs. 
• Drive operational rigor for defining new and maintaining existing governance processes, possibly including tactic review, asset management, etc. Specifically, provides review, approval and/or recommendations on brand ticket submissions from across our global team related to co-branding, sub brands and verbal/visual identity 
• Lead the rollout of evolved brand messaging to ensure best-in-class, consistent, on-brand expression across every touchpoint 
• Drive internal brand education, governance and adherence to brand standards across internal teams and agency partners, including ongoing brand auditing of marketing materials and feedback loops to improve asset quality, speed-to-market and ongoing brand training programs.

Culture Building / Program Management

• Brand Ambassador program: Work with internal communication and training groups to develop brand ambassadors and communicate brand values to internal stakeholders. Serve as primary liaison for internal design, content creators and agency creative directors, maintaining a forum or council and driving visibility and alignment across creative leads
• Brand training program: Effectively collaborate across Marketing and within the businesses to communicate UL’s brand excellence framework and train them to drive adoption. Foster brand-led culture through engaging and educating internal teams, strengthening understanding of brand strategy, identity and voice through monthly updates (e.g. newsletter) and quarterly trainings. Create a brand learning culture and a culture of continuous improvement. 
• Branded Merchandise store: Help establish and manage UL’s brand merchandise store and facilitate regionally relevant sourcing models.
• Communications: Partner with internal comms, human resources to ensure brand messaging, engagement and evangelism permeates through all employees across the enterprise

Tools and Resources:

• Manage centralized brand portal as a dynamic, digital resource for the UL Brand Story, positioning, messaging, and guidelines, as well as key statistics and drivers 
• Partner across Marketing to 1) equip new teams members and agencies in international markets with tools and guidelines to understand and express the brand; 2) develop guidelines and tools to guide expression of UL brands within marketing partnerships; 3.) enable integration of acquired brand assets and businesses 
• Contributes to business success by performing other tasks as required

What makes you a great fit:

• Degree in business, communication, marketing or a related field 
• Minimum of six to eight years of related discipline experience or demonstrated competency including two years or more of relevant management/leadership experience or demonstrated competency 
• Expert and disciplined communicator 
• Strong collaboration skills 
• Facilitation, project planning and management skills 
• Strong business acumen, budget management 
• Strategic thinking, negotiation skills 
• Strong capabilities and experience working with senior leaders 
• Analytical acumen 
• Strong command of visual, verbal and strategic brand identity elements 
• Ability to work in a matrix environment 
• Demonstrated skill in team management 
• Able to understand technical and scientific issues and to translate complex information for nonscientific audiences 
• Strong proficiency in Microsoft Office and experience managing and/or using a wide array of internal communication tools 

UL has COVID-19 protocols and policies in place to ensure the safety of our employees, customers and clients. Effective November 1, 2021, the company mandates that employees are vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment (except where prohibited by law), subject to reasonable accommodation as required by law.

What you’ll experience working at UL:

• Mission: For UL, corporate and social responsibility isn’t new. Making the world a safer, more secure and sustainable place has been our business model for the last 125 years and is deeply engrained in everything we do. 
• People: Ask any UL employee what they love most about working here, and you’ll almost always hear, “the people.” Going beyond what is possible is the standard at UL. We’re able to deliver the best because we employ the best. 
• Interesting work: Every day is different for us here as we eagerly anticipate the next innovation that our customers’ create. We’re inspired to take on the challenge that will transform how people live, work and play. And as a global company, in many roles, you will get international experience working with colleagues around the world. 
• Grow & achieve: We learn, work and grow together with targeted development, reward and recognition programs as well as our very own UL University that offers extensive training programs for employees at all stages, including a technical training track for applicable roles. 
• Total Rewards: All employees at UL are eligible for bonus compensation. UL offers a generous 401k matching structure of up to 5% of eligible pay. Additionally, we invest an additional 4% into your retirement saving fund after your first year of continuous employment. We provide Healthcare Reimbursement Accounts and Health Savings Accounts that UL contributes to twice per year! Depending on your role, you can work with your manager on flexible working arrangements. We also provide employees with paid time off including vacation, holiday, sick and volunteer time off.