Brand Manager

This role is responsible for protecting and strengthening the Thrivent brand, managing, and governance of the Brand Strategy, across Thrivent. The Brand Manager will help elevate the organization’s advocacy of and mastery in brand, working with another Brand Manager and the assistant brand managers for support. This position collaborates closely with other partners across marketing to ensure brand strategy is delivered consistently through earned, owned and paid channels to help deliver on Thrivent’s strategic goals. This role is positioned within the Brand and Integrated Marketing team and reports to the Director, Brand & Integrated Planning

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES: 

• Provides strategic brand direction supporting the Thrivent positioning across the organization, including consistency in activations of the brand, specificity on how the brand is translated into products, experiences, and socialization across the organization of all brand-owned decisions and education.
• Models a client-focused culture engaging the enterprise and its leaders around brand strategy and our target audience to align and ensure focus. Driving high trust and satisfaction levels with internal and external business partners by sharing brand best practices, keep up on brand trends and deliver strong strategic creative briefs.
• Drives the advancement of our brand through the analysis and interpretation of brand research to develop and deploy efforts that grow awareness and consideration ranging from earned, owned and paid campaigns and sponsorships to branded basics (letterhead, business cards, etc.), to digital properties, to the offerings in the brand store.
• Protects our brand by consulting on ideas before and through development as well as asking teams to modify or remove expressions if required. Creates and deploys education and self-services tools (e.g. Brand Central) to drive the consistency of our brand and protect our intellectual property. Asks strategic questions to ensure understanding of request to provide a strong point of view that is a win-win for the brand and the business partner.
• Builds strong and trusted relationships with internal and external stakeholders to drive the brand forward. Is seen and leveraged as a Brand SME. Communicates brand strategy / best practices / guidelines clearly and effectively, helping build advocacy across Thrivent.
• Collaborates with creative team on the ongoing application and evaluation of our brand visual or verbal guidelines identifying opportunities to improve the efficiency of application and health of our brand through the ongoing monitoring of these guidelines and managing the updates.
• This role will influence business decisions on positioning the organization and its offerings, products and services within the market and with our target audience that will ultimately be embedded into the customer experience.
• Manages the brand strategy with specific internal and external stakeholders, including marketing, PR, creative, content, experience & innovation teams (internal), offer family and distribution channel leadership, creative, PR, marketing and content agencies. Builds strong and trusted relationships with internal teams/clients, business leadership and external agencies; is seen and leveraged as a Brand SME.

QUALIFICATIONS & SKILLS:  

Required:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in marketing, communications, brand or related field.
• 8+ years of professional experience in consumer facing Brand strategy and management, Marketing, and/or Communications; financial services experience preferred.
• Solid understanding of brand strategy and development, multichannel marketing concepts and consumer trends impacting their expectations of brands.
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills – ability to use data to develop brand positioning.
• Familiarity with creative briefs and requirements for good creative.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment with multiple priorities and tight deadlines, possess drive, flexibility and be an enthusiastic team player.
• Ability to shift and adapt to changing priorities; proactively anticipating obstacles and seeking alternatives to keep projects on track.
• Strong communication skills, verbal, written, and presentation, with ability to serve as effective speaker and corporate representative on branding.

Preferred: 

• Ability to travel as needed, up to 10%.