Senior Director, Head of Brand Intelligence

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Lead and develop the team. A strong team of researchers and analysts is in place. Grow their capabilities, develop their careers, and hire for strategic gaps. Set the standard for rigor in discovery, synthesis, and recommendation. Create conditions for breakthrough work.
• Drive discovery forward. Shape how the practice uncovers human truth. Push methods beyond validation into real discovery. Behavioral research designed for insight, not confirmation. Prototype approaches that capture behavior in context: journey moments, in-platform, real-world environments. Leverage AI to enable qualitative depth at scale. Partner across the agency to test and scale what works.
• Translate signals into strategy. Own the interpretive layer between data and decision. Use AI-assisted synthesis to identify patterns, tensions, and contradictions across studies and contexts. Connect behavior (what people do) with culture (what it means) and situation (why it changes). Frame findings as strategic implications clients can act on.
• Activate insight at scale. Make sure intelligence shapes decisions, not just informs them. Advise clients at the senior table on positioning, audience strategy, brand performance, and growth decisions. Translate research and analytics into commercial moves. Build the tools, dashboards, and frameworks that make insight usable and living, not static reports.
• Embed intelligence across the agency. Connect the work to strategy, creative, CX, and engineering teams. Make sure behavioral and cultural insight gets to the front of the brief. Build the relationships and systems that put intelligence at the center of how C&T thinks and builds for clients.
• Lead externally. Keynotes, bylines, conference moments, original POV. Build the public voice of a practice positioned to lead the market in differentiated behavioral and cultural intelligence.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Extensive years of experience building strategy and intelligence work at senior levels. You've led teams, shaped practices, and translated research into business outcomes. You bring leadership weight and credibility to a complex, cross-functional role.
• Strategic thinking grounded in human insight. You understand how people decide and behave, and you know how to turn that into strategy that moves business. You've built expertise across research, data, and cultural signal, whether as a strategist who learned research or a researcher who learned strategy. You don't pick a side; you integrate them into coherent recommendations.
• Behavioral and cultural grounding. Academic or applied: behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, semiotics, cultural studies. You read culture structurally, not as trend-spotting. You understand why people behave as they do, not just what they do.
• Structured method and strategic thinking. You bring clarity to ambiguous problems. You frame hypotheses, design research to test them, and translate findings into strategic recommendations.