Responsibilities

• Lead strategy development across major loyalty accounts, from initial diagnostic and opportunity sizing through to programme design, commercial modelling and go-to-market planning
• Own the strategic narrative on client engagements - structuring complex problems, commissioning research and data analysis, synthesising those findings into clear recommendations, and presenting with confidence at senior levels
• Work with and enhance existing frameworks for programme evaluation including commercial modelling, incrementality modelling, headroom analysis, share-of-wallet assessment and behavioural segmentation
• Lead workshop design and facilitation with clients, from discovery sessions that surface the real commercial question, through to strategic alignment workshops that get the right people in the room making the right decisions
• Have a point of view on what good looks like: understand how the strongest long-term programmes (Clubcard, Avios, Nectar, others) have stayed relevant, how non-traditional models are working (M&S Sparks) and how that applies to the client and prospect challenges we are exploring

Requirements

• Experience in loyalty, CRM, consulting or customer engagement strategy — you don't need to have spent your career in loyalty, but you should have worked with loyalty clients and have a clear sense of what makes programmes succeed or fail
• A track record of leading complex, multi-stakeholder strategy projects from brief to delivery, including direct client involvement at senior level (Account handling and Programme Management will run the project, but the Strategy Director will have significant client exposure and involvement)
• Experience designing or advising on loyalty and/or customer engagement programmes, not just optimising activities, but engaging with the more difficult strategic questions: what should this programme fundamentally be, what behaviour is it trying to change and what does it need to be/become to achieve this?
• Strong relationship with data and insight: you are someone who starts with the evidence, who knows how to interrogate analysis, and who builds arguments on a foundation of proof rather than instinct alone
• Comfort with commercial modelling: you don't need to build the models yourself, but you need to understand them, pressure-test them and know when the numbers are telling the right story
• Experience in transport, financial services, retail or travel is an advantage — though intellectual curiosity and the ability understand a new sector quickly matters more than category expertise
• Outstanding written and verbal communication: you write clearly, structure arguments rigorously, and can take a complex brief and turn it into a narrative that moves a room
• Strong facilitation: you can run a workshop with a room full of senior clients, hold the space, and extract genuine strategic insight from the conversation
• A genuine creative instinct - you can make the leap from insight to idea, from problem to proposition. Strategy at its best is inventive, and we expect this person to produce work that is genuinely surprising as well as intellectually sound
• Data literacy and insight-driven thinking: you have an instinct to reach for evidence, strong experience with data as a strategic tool, and the ability to translate analytical output into clear strategic direction