Mandarin Oriental
Global Director of Brand Strategy
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Based within the Mandarin Oriental global brand organization and based at the London Corporate Head Office, Mandarin Oriental is seeking a Global Director of Brand Strategy to define and guide the strategic frameworks that shape how the brand and its hotels are positioned, structured, and experienced worldwide.
Reporting to the Vice President Brand, this role sits at the centre of the Brand team’s mandate to define, protect, and evolve the strategic, cultural, and creative foundations of the Mandarin Oriental brand. It owns the brand positioning, brand platform, and narrative universe, ensuring these are not only clearly defined, but actively applied, governed, and embedded across the Group.
The Director will own the Brand transformation roadmap, setting priorities, sequencing workstreams, and tracking progress across the initiatives that professionalize end-to-end brand management. While this role may not directly own every initiative within the roadmap, it is accountable for ensuring the overall agenda is coherent, strategically aligned, and moving at pace. It partners closely with Brand Experience, Brand Identity, CMI, Development, Design & Technical Services, Marketing, Operations, Resorts, Retail & Partnerships, and PR & Communications to ensure that every brand-impacting decision strengthens Mandarin Oriental’s long-term equity.
Key Responsibilities
Brand Strategy, Governance & Transformation
- Act as a strategic guardian of the Mandarin Oriental brand, ensuring that business decisions, property projects, partnerships, campaigns, and new initiatives are accurate, distinctive, and elevated expressions of the brand.
- Own the Brand transformation roadmap, translating the Group’s strategic agenda into a clear sequence of priorities, workstreams, milestones, and decision points.
- Develop and maintain the Group’s brand strategy, brand positioning, platform, and architecture, ensuring clarity across the masterbrand, sub-brands, product expressions, and future growth opportunities.
- Establish the strategic guardrails and governance approach that help teams make consistent, brand-led decisions while allowing each property and initiative to feel bespoke and locally relevant.
- Partner with the Director of Brand Experience, who owns the definition and codification of brand markers, rituals, and signature moments, to ensure those expressions remain tightly linked to the wider brand strategy.
Brand Positioning, Narrative & Creative Direction
- Define, protect, and continuously sharpen the Mandarin Oriental brand positioning, ensuring it remains distinctive, relevant, and commercially powerful in the luxury hospitality landscape.
- Build and evolve the wider brand universe around the positioning, including the brand platform, narrative territories, strategic messaging, proof points, and expression principles that guide how the brand shows up across audiences, markets, and touchpoints.
- Own the strategic positioning of Mandarin Oriental in the market and against the competitive set, translating category shifts, competitor moves, and guest expectations into clear implications for brand strategy.
- Provide brand creative direction for Group-level campaigns, ensuring creative briefs, concepts, and outputs are anchored in the brand positioning and elevate the brand’s desirability, distinctiveness, and cultural relevance.
- Work closely with Marketing, PR & Communications, and external creative partners to ensure campaign ideas, content platforms, and storytelling territories are strategically coherent, creatively ambitious, and unmistakably Mandarin Oriental.
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Portfolio, Hotel & Project Positioning
- Lead the strategic positioning work for new hotel, resort, and residence projects, ensuring each project reinforces the Group brand while articulating a clear and differentiated local proposition.
- Partner with Development, Design & Technical Services, Wellness, F&B, Resorts, and Operations from the early concept stage through opening readiness to ensure brand intent is translated into clear strategic direction.
- Review and challenge brand-impacting decisions across projects, renovations, repositionings, and rebrandings, holding the bar on relevance, distinctiveness, and elevation.
- Build a coherent portfolio narrative, ensuring the Group’s expansion strengthens Mandarin Oriental’s desirability, price premium, and long-term equity rather than diluting the brand.
Insights, Customer-Centricity & Strategic Alignment
- Work closely with the Customer & Market Insights team to ensure brand strategy is grounded in guest segments, behaviours, market dynamics, and competitive intelligence.
- Translate qualitative and quantitative insight into strategic direction that improves brand relevance, strengthens differentiation, and informs decision-making across the Group.
- Create alignment across Brand, Marketing, Operations, Development, and regional teams so that brand strategy moves from central intent to property-level reality.
- Use insight and governance forums to surface risks, resolve inconsistencies, and ensure initiatives are prioritized against the Brand transformation roadmap.
Brand Stewardship & Operating Rhythm
- Support the Vice President Brand in running the Brand operating rhythm, including roadmap reviews, governance discussions, and decision-making forums that keep cross-functional priorities moving.
- Serve as a senior advisor to internal teams and external partners on brand strategy, portfolio logic, property positioning, and strategic brand fit.
- Identify where brand standards, tools, processes, or approval gates need to be strengthened to improve consistency and reduce dilution across the portfolio.
- Contribute to the definition of brand success measures, including brand health, consistency, price premium, adoption, and delivery of agreed transformation priorities.
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What We Expect From You
- Significant professional experience in brand strategy, brand management, or strategic marketing roles within luxury hospitality, lifestyle, luxury consumer, or high-touch service sectors.
- Proven ability to manage complex brand architectures, positioning frameworks, and strategic transformation agendas across multiple markets or business units.
- Strong understanding of property, product, or experience positioning, preferably in collaboration with development, design, operations, or experience teams.
- Highly comfortable using customer, market, and competitive insight to inform strategic choices and prioritize action.
- Strong creative judgement, with the ability to guide campaign briefs, assess creative concepts, and ensure marketing output is fully aligned with brand positioning.
- Excellent stakeholder management skills, with the maturity to influence senior leaders, challenge constructively, and create alignment across functions.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to turn complex strategic thinking into clear narratives, frameworks, and decision materials.
- Structured, organized, and comfortable managing a roadmap of interdependent initiatives without necessarily owning every workstream directly.
- Culturally astute, globally minded, and passionate about luxury, hospitality, craft, and brand-led growth.
- Willingness to travel internationally.
Our Commitment To You
- Learning & Development: Your success is our success. We craft unique learning and development programs for various stages in your career so that you grow, continuously.
- MOstay: When you work as hard as our colleagues do, it’s important to take time off. As a member of the #MOfamily, you can stay with us wherever you go in the world. The MOstay program offers complimentary nights and additionally attractive rates on rooms for you and your loved ones.
- Health & Colleague Wellness: Finding the right work-life balance is important. Your wellbeing matters to us. A variety of health benefits and wellness programs are offered to all our colleagues, globally.
- Retirement Plans: When you show commitment to us, we reciprocate. We offer different retirement plans depending on the length of your service and your role.
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