Job Description

Majid Al Futtaim invites you to join us in our quest to create great moments for everyone, everyday! We are the leading shopping mall, residential communities, retail and leisure pioneer across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, serving over 560 million visitors a year. For the past two decades, we have shaped the consumer landscape across the region, transforming the way people shop, live and play, while maintaining a strong sustainability track record and the largest mall in the world to attain LEED Gold EBOM Certification. We have over 40,000 team members in 15 international markets representing over 100 nationalities - all keeping the customer at the heart of everything we do. If you enjoy being BOLD, PASSIONATE and TOGETHER, then Majid Al Futtaim is the destination for you.

Job Purpose:

We are looking for a brand-obsessed individual, with a proven ability to build brands, who can partner in building brand strategy for new and existing brands across Majid Al Futtaim. The role will mean working with our different businesses across industries, helping them create clarity around any new/evolved business concepts being proposed, creating clear product/service proposition, vision, values, insights, competitive differentiation, and target audience.

Working with brand agencies, your brief-writing and creative evaluation skills will be second to none where you will take the brand strategy and platform to the next level by defining the naming strategy, identity design, and visual identity for our brands, all while continuing to work and align in close partnership with cross functional senior marketing teams and brand council.

You will also be able to structure research requirements along the brand journey, to help create clear, data driven decisions, leveraging deep target customer and competitive landscape understanding to allow a solid base for making decisions. You will be an expert at leveraging and digging through customer insights to drive decision-making around brand positioning that drives clear communication and marketing.

The role will also involve you assisting to drive an extensive marketing capability-building agenda across the organization, ensuring we are arming our marketing community with the necessary skills to deliver great marketing that drives customer love.

Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities:

• Leads the definition of Brand purpose, strategic equities behind the brand, brand character, and key differentiators with competition
• Leads relationship with brand agency in articulating strategy in the development of visual brand identity, guidelines etc.
• Support all brand strategy requirements across the organization through development of new brands and any rebranding, working closely with the businesses
• Support all brand research requirements (brand development, tracker, brand valuation) and ensures follow-through action plans on findings School of Marketing content creation (with agency as well as self-created where appropriate)
• Support all marketing/brand capability building curriculum and agenda for training requirements in facilitating some training modules
• Improves marketing and brand capability across the business through training curriculum
• Maintains the Majid Al Futtaim naming and brand architecture and leads all discussion for BU brand architecture
• Maintains both internal and external corporate brand guidelines and brand visual language
• Maintain the brand intellectual property management with legal department
• Owns the brand Mportal Brand Forum, hosting all tabled requisitions for brand creation/evolution requests
• Create & manage a Brand Community Forum to discuss great brand work across business units, where the teams inspire each other with their work that has taken strategy into action and creates winning, innovative, and desirable brands that win hearts and minds of customers and drive customer lifetime value.
• Proactively leverages customer insights to drive brand decision-making

Others:

• Strong grasp of brand, marketing, and advertising trends globally and regionally
• Strong understanding of brand governance and how to influence change
• Individual should be open to travel in MENA region
• Agile mindset with ability to quickly find simple solutions

Qualifications, Personal Characteristics and Required Background/Experience:

Qualifications

• MS/MBA in Business administration marketing sciences or comparable qualification BS in marketing

Experience

• Professional experience: 6-8 years of brand building & management - experience in Brand Strategic Planning in a top-tier advertising agency, experience in creating successful new brands, developing, and growing existing brands, brand architecture design, planning brand campaigns, defining sponsorships, developing brand equity and governance. Must also be experienced at workshop/ training facilitation, presenting/inspiring marketeers when training them f2f or online.
• Necessary Experience: It is essential that the candidate have extensive experience in defining and building new brands, repositioning existing brands and defining brand portfolios / brand architecture
• Industry background: Prior work experience should be in brand building within the FMCG word or in a similar position with a regional conglomerate

Skills

• A brand strategist, with brand strategy development experience
• Able to simplify complex strategy into simple and effective communication
• Able to occasionally operate in ambiguity and create clear and compelling insights
• Able to influence stake holders across the organization and work in cross-functional, cross-industry teams
• Expert at leading teams through the brand design thinking process
• Able to plan and organize and juggle multiple priorities driving multiple concurrent projects in an agile environment
• Familiar with middle east regional trends and insights, keeping a close eye on the brand trends
• Strong written and verbal skills with the ability to simplify complex topics
• Expert knowledge of branding processes and tools, capable of interacting with Marketing Managers and senior external partners
• Great communication skills and mature personality, a person who can engage and influence leaders in the Business Units; ability to work in a multicultural environment, good planning, and performance monitoring skills
• Fluent in English and fluency in Arabic would be a strong advantage
• Strong understanding of culture and regional sensitivities