Director Creative Strategy & Operations
Conagra Brands
- Location
- Chicago, Illinois
- Work model
- On-Site
- Level
- Staff
- H-1B history
- 7 approvals (FY2023)
- Posted
- 22h ago
About this role
Job Summary
Leads the development of consumer-driven creative strategy, brand platforms, and operational practices that strengthen brand-building across the enterprise portfolio. This role translates consumer behavior, cultural trends, business objectives, marketplace dynamics, and brand performance into clear strategic direction that inspires distinctive, effective creative work. Partners closely with brand, analytics, behavioral science, creative, and cross-functional teams to develop insights, briefs, campaign platforms, messaging frameworks, and tools that improve the quality and consistency of creative thinking. Also provides leadership for in-house agency operations, team capability building, and scalable ways of working that enable efficient execution, greater creative effectiveness and stronger business impact.
Responsibilities
Lead Deep Consumer Insight Development: Develop deep, behavior-based consumer insights that inspire stronger brand strategy and creative work, including the ability to identify unmet needs, behavioral tensions, emotional drivers, and cultural shifts that unlock new growth opportunities. Go beyond reported data and surface-level findings to identify emotional tensions, cultural shifts, category behaviors, and unmet consumer needs; synthesize consumer data, social listening, cultural observation, category dynamics, behavioral science, sales trends, competitive activity, and brand performance into sharp strategic implications. Conduct learning when needed through desk research, cultural scans, social mining, qualitative synthesis, and informal ethnographic-style observation. Partner with Analytics, Behavioral Science, Brand Marketing, and other teams to turn available data into more useful strategic thinking and serve as an enterprise expert on modern consumer behavior. Build a repeatable standard for what great insight means inside the in-house agency. Build Brand Campaign & Creative Platforms: Lead development of enduring brand platforms, campaign territories, strategic narratives, messaging architectures, and creative foundations for priority brands. Translate brand positioning, business objectives, audience understanding, and cultural context into clear strategic direction. Create platforms that scale across video, social, digital, retail, ecommerce, influencer, shopper, PR, and owned channels. Help brands move from one-off campaign ideas to long-term brand-building systems that are distinctive, ownable, creatively fertile, and connected to the brand’s role in consumers’ lives. Partner with brand teams to sharpen positioning, audience definition, brand voice, and consumer relevance. Provide clear, constructive, strategically grounded feedback on creative ideas, including identifying when work is too expected, generic, rational, category-conventional, or disconnected from the human truth. Creative Thought Leadership & Knowledge Development: Act as an enterprise creative strategist by partnering with brand teams to clarify business challenges, consumer barriers, growth opportunities, desired behavior changes, and strategic choices. Write and lead best-in-class creative briefs for major campaigns and priority initiatives, transforming business asks into clear, provocative creative problems. Synthesize consumer behavior, marketplace dynamics, competitive activity, cultural shifts, performance data, and organizational knowledge into clear, actionable strategic guidance. Create strategic artifacts that shape and elevate brand thinking, including creative briefs, brand books, positioning frameworks, knowledge audits, audience profiles, messaging architectures, cultural trend reports, and campaign playbooks. Develop strategic narratives, thought pieces, and planning frameworks that enable marketers, agency partners, and creative teams to move beyond tactical execution toward stronger brand-building. Create tools, frameworks, and deliverables that improve how teams develop insights, evaluate