Senior Brand Research Specialist

Senior Brand Research Specialist

The Senior Brand Research Specialist is responsible for generating the research and insights needed to manage the brand and guide brand, advertising, communications, and marketing strategy across all lines of business within the organization. Role includes working with leaders to assess brand strength, identify strategic opportunities, understand competitive positioning, quantify the business value of the brand and help drive it. It partners across Brand, Marketing, Communications, Media, Customer Experience, Product, Strategy, Analytics, and business teams to convey insights and translate into clear implications and actionable recommendations.

The role supports and leverages a comprehensive brand and advertising measurement program spanning the enterprise. Work includes continuous brand health tracking of key brand metrics; with competitor benchmarking; brand focused market mix modeling perceptual mapping and driver analysis; strategic deep dives; and overseeing self-service data dashboards. The specialist works with analysts to quantify the drivers of the brand via modeling and analytics to guide brand strategies. Success requires strategic synthesis and executive communication, strong qualitative and quantitative research expertise, hands-on data preparation and understanding, vendor management leadership, and modern AI-supported execution.

Responsibilities:

• Assess brand strength, emerging risk, strategic opportunity, and competitive positioning by interpreting performance trends, competitor benchmarks, audience differences, and the broader customer, advertising and media, cultural, economic, and business context.
• Manage continuous brand measurement across enterprise, sub-brand, product, segment, multicultural, and local-market audiences across key brand and product metrics.
• Partner with Brand, Marketing, Communications, Media, Customer Experience, Product, Strategy, Analytics, and line-of-business leaders to clarify decisions, define research objectives, build learning agendas, and prioritize the questions with the greatest strategic and business value.
• Design and lead end-to-end qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method brand and advertising research, including scoping, methodology selection, questionnaire and discussion-guide development, sampling, fieldwork, analysis, synthesis, recommendations, and stakeholder activation.
• Leverage driver research to explain what is shaping brand favorability and translate into practical guidance on brand strategy, positioning, value propositions, audience priorities, messaging, experience improvement, media investment, sponsorships, partnerships, and long-term brand building.
• Measure and optimize advertising performance by linking campaign exposure, media activity, brand metrics, and business outcomes to identify what is working, why, and where to improve impact over time.
• Develop executive-ready brand performance summaries, scorecards, strategic deep dives, foresight perspectives, scenario analyses, and decision narratives; facilitate working sessions that align stakeholders on implications, choices, investment tradeoffs, and next actions.
• Work with teams to enable appropriate self-service use of brand data, scorecards, deeper-analysis datasets, brand models, simulation tools, and media-investment scenarios by helping establish clear definitions, documentation, quality standards, and interpretation guidance.
• Manage research agencies, panel providers, technology platforms, and analytics partners; evaluate methodological fit, sample quality, data practices, deliverables, timing, cost, security, and value; challenge weak approaches and resolve quality issues early.
• Advance the organization's research capabilities by evaluating, adopting, and applying emerging technologies, AI-enabled tools, automation, advanced analytics, and new research methodologies to improve insight quality, speed, scalability, efficiency, and business impact.

Required skills and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Market Research, Business, Psychology, Sociology, Statistics, Economics, Communications, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• 8+ years of experience in market research, consumer insights, brand research, advertising research, customer insights, strategic research, or a related client-side, agency, consulting, or supplier environment.
• Demonstrated experience leading end-to-end qualitative and quantitative research, including large scale programs, applying sound methodological judgment to design studies, generate actionable insights, and communicate recommendations to senior stakeholders
• Brand, marketing, and advertising measurement experience, including research that informs brand strategy, campaign strategy, creative development, communications, and the effectiveness of integrated marketing efforts.
• Experience with one or more of the following: creative or copy testing, concept testing, message testing, brand lift, campaign evaluation, segmentation, usage and attitudes, drivers analysis, customer experience, journey research, qualitative communities, diary studies, or ethnography.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to work with structured and unstructured data, assess data quality, identify methodological risks, and convert complex findings into practical business implications.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including development of clear, compelling presentations and narratives for executive and senior-leadership audiences.
• Ability to build relationships, influence without direct authority, facilitate productive discussions, and act as a trusted thought partner across diverse stakeholder groups.
• Experience managing external research vendors or agencies, including scoping, briefing, quality oversight, timeline management, issue resolution, and evaluation of cost-quality tradeoffs.
• Ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments, proactively frame unclear problems, manage multiple competing priorities, and maintain quality and attention to detail under changing demands.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint and familiarity with survey, analytics, visualization, qualitative-analysis, or statistical tools used in modern research environments.
• Intellectual curiosity, sound judgment, high standards for evidence, and a commitment to converting insight into measurable business action rather than simply reporting results.

Desired skills and Experience:

• Advanced degree in Marketing, Market Research, Business, Psychology, Statistics, Data Science, Social Sciences, Communications, or a related discipline.
• Financial services experience or experience conducting research in another highly regulated, data-sensitive, or trust-dependent industry.
• Experience with enterprise brand reputation, master-brand and line-of-business relationships, brand architecture, sponsorship or partnership research, multicultural audience research, or geographically distributed market research.
• Experience linking brand and advertising measures to customer, media, digital, sales, or financial outcomes and collaborating with marketing analytics, media analytics, MMM, MTA, experimentation, or attribution teams.
• Experience modernizing recurring research deliverables through templated prompts, workflow automation, standardized knowledge sources, or scalable reporting processes.
• Working knowledge of statistical or analytical tools such as SPSS, R, Python, SQL, SAS, Power BI, Tableau, or comparable platforms.
• Experience designing, sourcing, or evaluating synthetic data for exploratory research, method development, hypothesis generation, or directional assessment.
• Experience facilitating executive workshops, decision sessions, strategy development, or cross-functional activation of research findings.

Locations:

• Charlotte
• New York
• Wilmington
• Boston
• Richmond
• Jacksonville

Shift:

1st shift (United States of America)

Hours Per Week:

40

Pay Transparency details:

US - MA - Boston - 100 Federal St - 100 Federal St Lp (MA5100), US - NY - New York - 1114 Avenue Of The Americas - Grace (NY1544), US - VA - Richmond - 8001 VILLA PARK DR - VILLA PARK OPS CENTER BLDG C (VA2100)

Pay range $114,800.00 - $169,200.00 annualized salary, offers to be determined based on experience, education and skill set.

Discretionary incentive eligible

This role is eligible to participate in the annual discretionary plan. Employees are eligible for an annual discretionary award based on their overall individual performance results and behaviors, the performance and contributions of their line of business and/or group; and the overall success of the Company.

Benefits

This role is currently benefits eligible. We provide industry-leading benefits, access to paid time off, resources and support to our employees so they can make a genuine impact and contribute to the sustainable growth of our business and the communities we serve.