Job Description
About us
At Shaped By, we believe there’s an unbreakable connection between creativity and tangible business results. We exist to help B2B-focused businesses uncover their authentic truth and become the boldest versions of themselves. As an agency, we put our people first – fostering a culture of respect, flexibility, and collaboration – while focusing on product before profit to ensure every creative output meets the highest standard.
Our vision is simple yet ambitious:
“To be the global champions for creative thinking and design excellence in the B2B world.” We’re a tight-knit team that loves to push creative boundaries in a niche but sizeable core target market: high-growth technology brands that are shaping the future of business. We do this while also championing the well-being of our people through friendly working hours, robust benefits, and genuine opportunities for professional growth.
Context
Strategy is a growing part of how we work with clients, and we’re building the team around it. We’re adding a Midweight Strategist to run parts of our brand engagements and take on smaller pieces of strategy work of their own. It’s a chance to develop your craft alongside a senior strategy team as the practice grows.
The roleAs Midweight Strategist you will work on brand strategy for growth-stage B2B tech companies, from Series A to pre-IPO, most of them US-headquartered and in categories where trust is hard to earn.
You’ll run defined workstreams within our engagements, from research through to the brief, and take on smaller, well-scoped projects yourself with support from the Senior Strategist and Strategy Director.
The core of the job is brand: positioning, brand architecture, brand platforms and messaging for companies that are usually building their foundations for the first time. Strategy here ends in identity, not a deck, so you’ll work closely with our Creative Directors and design team. Reporting to the Strategy Director, with day-to-day coaching from the Senior Strategist.
Required skills
What’s expected from you
Delivering brand strategy
- You run defined workstreams within our brand engagements, such as category and competitor audits, audience work or messaging frameworks, and own them from planning to delivery.
- You take on smaller, well-scoped strategy projects yourself, with the Senior Strategist or Strategy Director reviewing the thinking at key points.
- You draft positioning options, brand platform elements and messaging that a creative team can work from, and you can set out the alternative routes and explain the one you’d choose.
- You interpret a client brief and understand the business behind it: how the company makes money, who buys, how the sale happens and where the brand has to do the work.
Research and insight
- You plan and run parts of discovery: desk research, category and competitor reviews, and stakeholder and customer interviews, including writing the discussion guides.
- You read category, search and review data and pull out insights the team can act on, and you know the difference between an observation and an insight.
- You synthesise what you find into clear implications for the strategy, so the team can see what each finding means for the recommendation.
Into the creative
- You write single-minded creative briefs and brief the creative team, with support from the Senior Strategist or Strategy Director on our larger programmes.
- You stay involved through concept development, giving the team useful stimulus and clear, considerate feedback on whether the work carries the strategy.
- You work closely with the Creative Director: Visual & Design, the Creative Director: Concept & Verbal and their teams, and you help plan and facilitate workshops and creative sessions.
Clients
- You present your parts of the work to client teams, and you build the presentations that tell the story of a recommendation clearly.
- You can set out a hypothesis and how we’d test it, and show data in a way that makes the argument easy to follow.
- You help define objectives and the measures that will show whether the work is doing its job.
The agency
- You work with Client Services to plan your time and deliver your workstreams on brief, on time and on budget.
- You contribute research and thinking to proposals and pitches.
- You lead initiatives within the strategy team, such as templates, tools and how we use AI.
- You know what you want to learn next, and you look for the projects and training that will get you there.
Capabilities
- Three to five years in strategy, a good part of it in brand consultancy or a brand and design studio.
- A portfolio of positioning, brand platform or messaging work you made a substantial contribution to, with a clear sense of which parts you owned.
- Good design literacy. You understand how strategy becomes identity, and you can give a design team clear feedback on whether a route reflects the strategy.
- You write clearly and simply. A creative brief and a messaging framework are both writing jobs, and you’re good at both.
- You’re confident presenting your work to clients and colleagues, you can explain your thinking when it’s questioned, and you take feedback well.
- You’re comfortable with data. You can read category and search data, customer reviews and research findings, and turn them into a point of view.
- You already use AI in your work to go faster and think better, in line with our people-first values and AI manifesto, and you’re curious about where it helps and where it doesn’t.
- You can manage your own workload across several projects, and you know when to ask for help.
Ideally, you’ll also have:
- Experience with B2B technology brands, or another category where the product is complex and the buyer is technical.
- Some experience of campaign or content strategy.
- An interest in marketing effectiveness and how brand work is measured.
If you have the essentials but not all of these, apply anyway.
Benefits
What’s in it for you:
- 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and Christmas shutdown.
- Competitive salary with annual reviews.
- Company sick pay up to 5 days per year, otherwise statutory sick pay.
- Life assurance at 4x salary.
- Health cash plan (taxable benefit).
- Professional development budget of £500 per annum.
- Participation in the company reward scheme, subject to annual profitability targets.
- Tech scheme and cycle to work scheme (salary sacrifice).
The finer details:
- This is hybrid role only – operating 2 days flexible working and 3 days studio time at Paintworks Bristol
- Working hours Monday to Friday 9.00am to 5.30pm, with one hour available for lunch each day. 37 ½ hours per week
Diversity, inclusion & belonging
At Shaped By, everyone is welcome and has the opportunity to get on. Fostering a diverse and inclusive culture is at the core of how we do business. It’s embedded in our core principles: People first and product before profit.
As part of these principles, we’re committed to supporting inclusion and diversity. Everyone is welcome and supported in their development at all stages in their journey with us.