Brand Strategist, Principal

Your Role

The Brand Strategy team develops, manages, and maintains the company’s brand identity, ensuring consistency across all customer touchpoints and alignment with business goals. The team shapes how the brand is perceived by customers, employees, and the broader market. The Brand Strategist Principal will report to the Senior Director, Brand and Demand Marketing. In this role you will serve as a senior strategic leader responsible for advancing the brand’s vision, positioning, and narrative, ensuring alignment with business goals and market opportunities. You will engage with leadership, collaborate with strategists and creative teams, and guide cross functional partners to maintain a cohesive and high impact and agile brand presence.

Our leadership model is about developing great leaders at all levels and creating opportunities for our people to grow – personally, professionally, and financially. We are looking for leaders that are energized by creative and critical thinking, building and sustaining high-performing teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.

Your Work

In this role, you will:

• Lead the integration, integrity, and consistency of the Blue Shield brand ensuring it shows up powerfully and cohesively across all channels and touchpoints
• Drive the Blue Shield brand to further enhance the branding of products and services, while incorporating analysis of current market data and trends
• Shape and influence brand elements, tone, and expression, ensuring they reflect the company’s mission, values, and strategic direction 
• Lead the development of strategic briefs that translate brand strategy into clear, actionable direction for creative teams — transforming business needs into compelling creative opportunities 
• Apply research, information, and insights distilling down into a single strategic idea for our creative team and marketing partners to operate from
• Align annual Brand planning with the marketing playbook planning cycle, ensuring brand strategy is embedded in organizational priorities and planning rhythms
• Guide major brand initiatives and integrated marketing campaigns by driving a full‑funnel approach that aligns Brand across growth and member marketing through strong cross‑functional partnerships
• Own enterprise‑level brand positioning, architecture, visual identity, and messaging frameworks to drive clarity and differentiation across the organization
• Set and steward enterprise brand standards, ensuring consistent application across all internal teams and external partners
• Partner closely with marketing, product, sales, and executive teams to ensure brand alignment across initiatives and reinforce a unified brand experience
• Partner closely with digital and measurement teams to monitor campaign performance, brand preference and other KPIs to ensure optimal campaign performance

Your Knowledge and Experience

• Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• Requires at least 10 years of prior relevant experience
• Requires in-depth knowledge of health plans and insurance products and services
• Requires strong command of brand marketing principles, frameworks, and best practices, brand strategy development and enhancement including B2B/B2C marketing experience
• Requires experience in marketing project management at both strategic and tactical levels, with the ability to engage with executive leadership
• Requires experience creating executive level presentations
• Strong business acumen with advanced critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making expertise in collaboration with creative teams and cross-functional stakeholders, driving clarity when and where needed

Hybrid 

This role requires employees to be in-office based on our hybrid workplace model, balancing purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility. For most teams, this means coming into the office two days each week.

Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location will work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.