Associate Director, Strategy

New York City, NY (Hybrid)

$125K/yr – $150K/yrSenior Level6+ years expFull time

Posted 4 weeks ago

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Job Summary

Own strategic workstreams for brand and marketing engagements, turning complex inputs into clear recommendations that feed activation across identity, messaging, and campaigns.

  • Own significant strategy workstreams and build trusted client relationships.
  • Translate research, data, and stakeholder input into concise, actionable strategic recommendations.
  • Shape deliverables so strategy informs creative and measurable business impact.

Job Description

Responsibilities

  • Own significant strategy workstreams or smaller engagements, keeping the work organized, focused, and moving.
  • Translate research, data, stakeholder input, and team discussion into clear strategic implications, choices, and recommendations.
  • Lead strategy workstreams with increasing independence.
  • Help translate insights into actionable recommendations for brand identity, messaging, campaigns, experiences, and activation.
  • Anticipate risks, gaps, or open questions early, and escalate when guidance or a decision is needed.
  • Apply core strategy tools and methods to structure work and strengthen recommendations.
  • Build client confidence through preparation, responsiveness, judgment, and clear communication.
  • Shape clear, useful strategic work and connect thinking to creative outcomes.

Requirements

  • A Bachelor’s degree, or a more advanced degree, with 6-9 years of experience in brand strategy, marketing strategy, communications strategy, customer/audience strategy, consulting, research, or a related discipline.
  • Experience developing insights, strategic recommendations, positioning, messaging, creative briefs, experience principles, or other client-ready strategy deliverables.
  • A working command of foundational strategy tools and methods, including strategic frameworks, stakeholder interviews, workshop support, qualitative and quantitative research inputs, competitive/category analysis, audience insight development, and synthesis.
  • Strong writing, presentation, facilitation, and communication skills.
  • Comfort working across different clients, categories, assignment types, and levels of ambiguity.
  • Ability to lead significant workstreams, collaborate across disciplines, and contribute to healthy engagement delivery.
  • Ability to manage up, ask for guidance when needed, and continue building strategic range and rigor over time.

Benefits

  • The chance to be a part of a growing company and the next success story
  • Amazing opportunities for career development
  • Recognition programs
  • Employee referral bonus
  • Fun and collaborative work environment
  • Casual dress code
  • Insurance Coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability)
  • 401(k) retirement plan, with employer 4% match
  • Work/life benefits, including mental health and wellbeing support
  • Flexible Time Off Policy
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VSA Partners

3.1 Glassdoor

VSA’s purpose is to design for a better human experience. As a strategy and creative agency, we blend consumer insights and data with human-centered design to activate meaningful, motivating and measurable experiences in an increasingly noisy world. With offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, VSA offers a full range of fully integrated capabilities—branding, advertising, data science and technology—all under one roof. VSA is also a proud member of Meet The People, an international family of unified but independent agencies. For more than 40 years, we have delivered solutions for business and creative leaders at some of the world’s most respected brands and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike and IBM.

Founded in 1982
Chicago, Illinois, USA
125 employees (44 in marketing)
54% recommend to a friend
85% CEO approval

Traffic Signals

Monthly Visitors
6.3K
Traffic Source Mix
Search
30.1%
Direct
49.8%
Referral
8.9%
Social
9.5%
Paid
1.3%

Headcount Trend

Current headcount: ~126

Marketing Team

Marketing Team Size
13 (10% of company)
Median Career Experience
14.5 years
Median Tenure
8.5 years
Marketing Roles Posted (Last 30 Days)
1

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