Director, Brand Strategy

About the role

You are the Director, Brand Strategy who will own the end-to-end brand strategy and the channels that bring our work to life, including social, influencer, and content, plus the integrated marketing function that keeps every campaign coordinated. You will partner closely with our Creative Director to ensure that brand thinking is translated into sharp, actionable briefs and that every campaign is built to perform. Your work will turn Relay's positioning into a coherent system that feels cohesive, differentiated, and grounded in deep customer insight. You will define category framing, competitive context, and audience segmentation so that our marketing is focused, measurable, and aligned with business outcomes. Success for you will look like campaigns that ship on schedule, brand health that improves over time, and a marketing engine that compounds in effectiveness rather than starting from scratch each quarter. You will steward brand governance as policy and assess partnership fit so that every collaboration reinforces our clarity and credibility. You will also lead three managers - content and social, influencer, and integrated marketing - while staying close enough to the craft to jump in and elevate work in progress.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Drive integrated marketing across the team, turning competing priorities into one clear, sequenced plan so every person knows what to work on when they sit down in the morning and campaigns ship on schedule without being reshuffled mid-flight.
• Oversee Relay's events, social, content, and influencer channels, building systems that increase throughput, hit targets, and raise the bar on differentiated, remarkable creative that earns attention.
• Set campaign strategy and author the creative briefs, defining campaign-level positioning, success criteria, and the brief that the studio executes against so that strategy translates into clear, actionable direction.
• Ensure every brief aligns stakeholders early and translates complex strategy into language the studio can execute, reducing rework and accelerating production.
• Own the brand's evidence base, including customer research, competitive analysis, and brand tracking, co-designing research and message testing with the Creative Director.
• Measure brand health through awareness tracking, brand lift, share of voice, and campaign effectiveness, using data to inform decisions and optimize over time.
• Define category framing, competitive context, and audience definition and segmentation so that our messaging is precise and our targeting is efficient.
• Steward brand governance as policy and assess partnership fit, ensuring that every collaboration reinforces our positioning and protects our equity.
• Lead three managers - content and social, influencer, and integrated marketing - and about seven people total, staying close enough to the craft to jump in when a channel needs it while maintaining strategic oversight.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to align marketing with product, sales, and customer success, ensuring that messaging, positioning, and go-to-market plans are consistent and credible.
• Establish clear processes and workflows that enforce deadlines, clarify ownership, and remove blockers so that the team can operate with autonomy and speed.
• Balance creativity with operational rigor, ensuring that bold ideas are grounded in strategy and can be executed reliably at scale.
• Build feedback loops between channels and insights so that learnings are captured, shared, and applied to future campaigns.
• Act as the brand voice internally, helping colleagues understand who we are, why we matter, and how we show up in the world of self-made business owners.
• Champion a culture of curiosity, experimentation, and continuous improvement, especially around how AI can enhance our work without replacing human judgment.

Requirements

• An end-to-end integrated marketer who has built and run campaigns from strategy through execution, and who holds strong opinions about what to prioritize and what to cut.
• Numerically fluent, able to interrogate a channel metric like influencer performance, stay skeptical, and see what a number is not telling you about underlying behavior.
• Assertive and process-oriented, with a demonstrated ability to implement and enforce marketing workflows across cross-functional teams while maintaining strong working relationships.
• Proven ability to align stakeholders with competing priorities around a single plan, exercising influence well beyond direct reporting lines through persuasion and clarity.
• Strong brand judgment and creative sensibility, combined with the operational rigor to translate strategy into consistent execution across channels and touchpoints.
• Energized by ambiguity and change, and curious about applying AI across your work to improve efficiency, insight, and relevance.
• Comfortable owning outcomes, not just tasks, and taking responsibility for the full impact of the brand strategy on business results.
• Willingness to follow process, adhere to timelines, and uphold Relay's standards for clarity, confidence, and control in every customer interaction.

Practical notes

The annual salary range for this role is $193,500 CAD to $236,500 CAD.

For candidates who demonstrate full readiness for the defined scope of the role, the typical starting salary is $215,000 CAD. Offers below this point reflect candidates we believe can grow into the full scope of the role with support and development. Offers above this point reflect impact that meaningfully exceeds the role's defined expectations or an expanded scope from day one.

We encourage you to have a conversation with your recruiter and ask questions about compensation throughout the hiring process. For more information on our compensation philosophy and perks and benefits, visit our Candidate Hub https://www.notion.so/Candidate-Hub-1c7da8b7f88580a893f7d7c7852b064e?pvs=21.

The Interview Process

Stage 1: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with a member of our Talent team.

Stage 2: A 60-minute Google Meet video call with the Hiring Manager.

Stage 3: A 60-minute working session with the hiring team.

Stage 4: A 45-minute Google Meet video call with a member of our leadership team.