Chief Brand Officer

The BBC is the World’s Public Service Media Organisation with a mission to inform, educate and entertain. A global voice inspired only by serving people and fighting for democracy; creativity that seeks to unite us; ideas that nourish all that’s good in us; an institution we know we can trust – Three blocks that symbolise something greater – a common ground where we all belong.

The industry is at a time of significant disruption with digital platforms driving new audience behaviours and so to deliver the mission the BBC is driving towards a ‘digital first’ future.

Key to delivering the mission is the BBC Brand. Our ambition is to build an iconic, brand with public service purpose at its heart that is a relevant to audiences of the future as it has been for the past 100 years.

Brand strategy is business strategy, but it requires strong functional leadership and the creation of this new role for the BBC is recognition of the importance than the Executive Committee and Board place of the role of the brand in driving effective growth.

The BBC Chief Brand Officer will play a critical role in driving audience value across the BBC and will work pan-BBC, across our Content (TV and Audio), News businesses. Audience value is defined as a ‘valued daily habit’ with the BBC, which is a measure of whether audiences are willing to pay the licence fee. In addition to this ‘consumption’ metric, for audiences to value the BBC they need to perceive the Brand as ‘for me’. In the future, most of the value will be delivered to audiences across our digital platforms so this role will also be pivotal to driving our digital growth.

Main Responsibilities

The BBC Chief Brand Officer will report to the Chief Customer Officer who sits on the BBC’s Executive Committee and manage a team of circa 250 employees and a multi-million-pound budget.

They will work closely with three other Executive Committee Members – Chief Content Officer, CEO News and Director Nations – and BBC Studios President of Brands and Licensing.

They will be accountable for creating and delivering the BBC’s Brand strategy, driving Brand led growth in partnership with Content and News Divisions and creating and delivering the annual brand communications plan for the UK (Public Service organisation).

To achieve this, they will be responsible for –

• Defining the BBC’s brand positioning and future Brand Architecture and ensuring in market delivery, working closely with BBC Studios.
• Define our Brand Portfolio Growth Strategy – defining our ‘priority brands’, the programme, service and talent brands with most growth potential and working in partnership with the Chief Content Officer, CEO News, Director Nations and our Audiences teams to ensure growth & innovation plans are in place for priority brands.
• Defining the key Brand equity and growth metrics for our ‘priority brands’ – and monitoring delivery. Reporting on performance to ExCo through the Half Year/Full Year Performance Review process.
• Define the Brand Experience across our major touch points (owned platforms and 3rd parties) to ensure a differentiated BBC brand experience and working in close partnership with the Chief Product Officer and Digital Service leads to ensure delivery.
• Creating and delivering the annual Brand Communications plan working with BBC Media and BBC Creative to ensure we deliver outstanding creativity and effectiveness across all communications touch points (owned media, paid media, social channels) that engages audiences, builds fandom, and drives consumption on our digital platforms.
• Managing significant marketing investment across owned and paid media to optimize Return on Investment.
• Chairing the Brand Leadership Group – the cross-business team that is empowered to drive accelerated growth of BBC brand equity, globally.
• Inspiring, leading, and developing a significant team of brand & marketing professionals including leadership of capability building across the BBC.
• Leading ‘brand’ capability building across the BBC.

Are You The Right Candidate?

The ideal candidate will be an experienced and inspiring Brand (or Category) Leader with strong business acumen, a track record of growing brands and who can bring sharp, sophisticated, and bold thinking to the BBC and who is expert at:

• Creating Brand Strategy (Brand Positioning, Architecture, portfolio strategy, communications strategy) ideally across multiple categories.
• Leading brand innovation working closely with product/editorial and insight functions to drive brand and category growth.
• Leading brand communications/marketing teams with a track record of developing creatively outstanding and effective campaigns for high profile brands with significant budgets.
• Delivering communication plans that build brands and drives new audiences but also optimizes loyalty and retention. You are likely to have experience of both brand building and data led performance marketing.
• Creating actionable audience insight and ideally to have had experience of unlocking the power of 1st party audience data to drive action.
• Measuring marketing effectiveness and ROI.
• Building excellent relationships and influence from colleagues at all levels in an organisation. With proven track record of Influencing and building excellent working relationships at Executive and Board level.
• A leader who understands and values the richness that diverse experiences and backgrounds brings to the business and has a track record of building inclusive teams.
• A leader with a strong Growth and innovation mindset.
• Highly effective and inspiring communicator, both written and verbal.
• A News, TV and Audio fan who understands the power of storytelling to transform behaviours and create culture.

Package Description

Band: Senior Leadership
Contract type: Permanent
Location: London

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

• Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
• Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
• Benefits – we offer a competitive salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 26 days (1 of which is a corporation day) with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.