Lead Brand Strategist

Are you a strategic thinker who loves uncovering deep insights about audiences and translating them into clear positioning, sharp messaging, and strategic direction for brand and digital work? If you're energized by research, synthesis, and connecting evidence to impact — you'll find a special home at Interactive Strategies. 

We're looking for a Lead Brand Strategist to join our growing Strategy team. In this role, you'll lead the research and strategic foundation of brand engagements — discovery, positioning, messaging, and audience insight — and partner closely with a creative director to translate that foundation into brand and digital solutions. You'll also extend brand strategy into how organizations show up across their web experience and marketing channels, working alongside UX, content, and creative teams to keep execution aligned to strategy. 

You'll work with mission-driven organizations — like the American Kidney Fund, Rainforest Trust, Urban Institute, CFP Board, Operation Smile, and The Wilderness Society — helping them build brand and digital strategies that move people and drive results.

Requirements 

You'll lead the research and strategy phase of engagements from discovery through recommendation, collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team of creative directors, UX designers, writers, developers, and project managers. We're looking for someone who can: 

• Lead brand discovery through stakeholder interviews, workshops, and brand research. 

• Design and conduct user and market research — qualitative and quantitative — to uncover audience motivations, perceptions, and unmet needs. 

• Synthesize research into actionable strategy deliverables — audience personas, brand narratives, positioning frameworks, value propositions, and messaging strategy — grounded in evidence, not intuition. 

• Define brand platforms (mission, vision, values, personality, messaging hierarchy) and partner with a creative director to translate that definition into visual and verbal expression. 

• Extend brand strategy into digital strategy — providing strategic direction and input on web experience and marketing initiatives, in partnership with UX, content, and creative teams who own execution. 

• Serve as the strategic throughline across an engagement — ensuring creative and digital solutions stay grounded in the research and positioning that informed them. 

• Bring new approaches to research and strategy, including how AI and data-informed methods can sharpen insight and speed synthesis. 

• Build strong, collaborative client relationships — facilitating workshops, presenting findings, and guiding decisions with clarity and confidence. 

• Contribute to business development by helping shape strategy-related proposals, approaches, and new offerings. 

• Continuously improve our research and strategy process. 

Qualities you bring to the table...

• Research Rigor. You design research that answers the right questions, and you trust evidence over instinct. 

• Strategic Vision. You connect audience insight to positioning and messaging, always grounded in evidence and clarity. 

• Synthesis Discipline. You take complex, sometimes conflicting inputs and turn them into a clear, defensible strategic direction. 

• Collaborative Partner. You work hand-in-hand with a creative director — contributing strategic direction, not creative execution — and know where that line sits. 

• Confident Communicator. You're at ease facilitating workshops, writing briefs, and presenting research and strategy to clients with clarity and poise. 

• Empathetic Leader. You listen first, synthesize complexity, and lead with emotional intelligence. 

• Curious by Nature. You're energized by digging into data and human insight to inform every recommendation.

• 10+ years of experience leading brand strategy engagements, with research as a core, hands-on part of your practice. 

• Demonstrated experience designing and running research — surveys, interviews, focus groups — and synthesizing findings into strategic frameworks. 

• Experience producing strategy documentation: personas, audience segmentation, competitive analysis, positioning frameworks, messaging architecture. 

• Comfort partnering with (not substituting for) creative direction — you can articulate strategic intent clearly enough for a creative team to execute against it. 

• Familiarity with how brand strategy connects to digital strategy — web experience and marketing channels — even if you haven't built wireframes or sitemaps yourself. 

• Excellent oral and written communication skills. 

• Experience developing client relationships and account growth strategies. 

• Agency experience is a plus. 

We have a simple motto when it comes to company culture, "Everyone deserves to come to work and be happy." This means a few things:

(1) we care as much about quality as we do about budgets

(2) we find the strengths in each employee and nurture them

(3) we encourage a culture that values innovation and creative freedom

(4) we want you to have fun. We understand that you have a life outside of work.

We allow our employees creative freedom. We treat them with respect. We value their opinions. In that spirit, we offer the following benefits:

• Company-sponsored health, vision and dental insurance
• Pre-tax Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
• Profit sharing
• 4 weeks of PTO to start, 5 weeks at year 3
• Company-paid short-term and long-term disability
• Company-paid life and AD&D insurance
• 11 paid holidays
• 401k with company match
• New business referral bonus
• Professional development opportunities
• Flexible work schedule
• Pre-tax DC Metro SmartBenefits

Salary Range

$110,000 – $130,000 (commensurate with experience)

A Little About Us:

We’re a DC-based digital agency with a national reach and a strategy-first mindset. We partner with nonprofits, associations, and mission-driven companies to help them connect more meaningfully with their audiences. We’re proud to be a certified LGBTBE business and an equal opportunity employer. We believe diverse voices lead to stronger work—and stronger impact.