VP, Strategy Director (Retail)

About the role

The VP, Strategy Director will lead strategy for a major retail client, turning business challenges, consumer insights, and cultural trends into clear opportunities that inspire creative work and drive brand growth. The role combines senior client counsel, integrated strategic leadership, cross-functional collaboration, business development, and mentorship. The ideal candidate is an experienced, culturally fluent strategy leader who can simplify complexity, build trusted relationships, inspire teams, and deliver inclusive, high-impact work.

What You'll Do

Shape the Strategy

• Lead integrated strategy across brand, purpose, reputation, and cultural initiatives
• Help clients uncover the human problem behind a business challenge and define how communications can create meaningful change
• Turn research, cultural intelligence, social listening and business data into clear, actionable strategic opportunities
• Develop compelling strategic frameworks, narratives, and creative briefs that inspire breakthrough ideas
• Guide annual planning and goal-setting, helping clients align around a clear vision and roadmap for success
• Identify shifts in consumer behavior, culture, retail, fashion, and lifestyle that can unlock new opportunities for the brand
• Ensure inclusivity is embedded throughout the strategic process and that the work resonates with diverse, intersectional audiences

Inspire the Work

• Be a close, trusted partner to creative teams from the first spark of an idea through launch and optimization
• Create the strategic conditions for work that is culturally relevant, emotionally resonant, and impossible to ignore
• Keep ideas grounded in the brief while giving teams the space and inspiration to take the work somewhere unexpected
• Ensure audience, channel, measurement, and activation plans connect back to the central strategy
• Interpret campaign results and identify opportunities to optimize the work, extend successful platforms, and build long-term brand equity

Build Strong Partnerships

• Serve as a trusted strategic advisor to senior clients, bringing clarity, confidence, and a strong point of view to the table
• Develop deep relationships across the client's marketing organization and broader agency-partner ecosystem
• Lead strategic conversations, workshops, and presentations that create alignment and help clients make confident decisions
• Proactively identify opportunities to expand the agency's impact and deepen the client relationship
• Partner with account leadership to protect, strengthen, and grow the business

Bring People Together

• Collaborate across creative, account, production, earned media, influencer, digital, social, technology, experience, and data and intelligence teams
• Connect different disciplines and perspectives around a shared strategic vision
• Navigate multiple projects, priorities, and stakeholders while maintaining a high bar for the work
• Create an environment where people feel supported, challenged, and empowered to do their best thinking

Who You Are

• You are an experienced strategy leader who is equally energized by people, culture, creativity, and business
• You know how to simplify complexity without losing what makes a challenge interesting, and you can move comfortably between a senior client conversation, a creative working session, and a coaching conversation with a developing strategist

Qualifications

• 8+ years in brand/communications strategy at a health agency or consultancy, with substantial experience in healthcare (e.g., retail health, pharmacy, payer and benefits, care delivery, or consumer health); adjacent wellness experience is a plus
• Experience partnering cross-functionally with creative, analytics, and client leadership
• Ability to follow our hybrid work policy
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

What You'll Find Here

• You'll have the opportunity to shape meaningful work for a highly visible client
• Collaborate with talented people across a wide range of disciplines
• Play a defining role in the growth of both the business and the strategy team
• We care deeply about the quality of our work and how we work together
• We value different perspectives, generous collaboration, continuous learning, and leaders who are as invested in developing people as they are in delivering great work

Pay

$105,000-$175,000 a year