VP: Brand and Media Strategy and Planning

Join Us at Barclays – Drive the Future of Brand Strategy! We're on the hunt for a visionary to take the reins as VP of Brand and Media, Strategy and Planning. This is more than a role—it's your opportunity to shape how millions engage with Barclays, driving a unified brand strategy that fuels long-term growth and relevance. You’ll be at the helm of cross-functional collaboration, insight-led planning, and executive-level influence.

If you’re someone who thrives on crafting compelling narratives and wants to be a catalyst in shaping our brand’s trajectory, this is your moment.

Core Competencies for a VP of Brand and Media, Strategy and Planning

1. Strategic Brand Leadership

• Embed a unified brand strategy and plan aligned with organisational goals, brand and commercial imperatives.

• Translate strategy and objectives, into exciting actionable briefs for agency partners.

2. Collaborative Planning and Governance

• Lead the development of brand laydown plans that coordinate across business units, manage clashes, and optimise sequencing.

• Facilitate regular planning sessions, ensuring alignment with leadership timelines and strategic milestones.

3. Stakeholder Engagement and Influence

• Champion a high-functioning, cross-functional Community of Practice that fosters open, transparent, and outcome-oriented dialogue.

• Build trust and credibility with senior stakeholders across marketing, insight and external agencies.

• Tailor communication styles to stakeholder preferences—whether data-driven, visual, or conversational—to ensure clarity and buy-in.

• Deliver excellent and compelling brand strategy thinking and documentation

4. Insight-Driven Decision Making

• Leverage brand tracking, marketing mix modelling, and competitor insights to inform strategic decisions and optimise campaign performance.

• Ensure insight flows are distilled into actionable recommendations, avoiding data overload and enabling timely decision-making.

• Integrate colleague and customer voice into any research and subsequent briefs to drive the desired outcomes.

5. Operational Excellence and Accountability

• Drive a culture of accountability and continuous improvement within the brand and media planning function.

• Ensure timely delivery of executive papers, research debriefs, and strategic updates, with clear ownership and escalation paths.

• Maintain rigorous documentation of actions, decisions, and timelines to support transparency and follow-through.

6. Executive Presence and Communication

• Represent the brand strategy function with confidence and clarity in senior forums.

To be successful as a VP of Brand and Media, Strategy and Planning, you should have experience with:

• Brand strategy experience and evidence of ability to translate this thinking and complex insight from all parts of the business into distilled and compelling papers (story telling)

• Positive, collaborative spirit and peer leadership to get to the best outcomes across squads, virtual teams etc. without direct leadership

• Extensive experience of Stakeholder engagement with strong negotiation skills, resilience, and emotional Intelligence

• Strong work-ethic and a focus on delivery

• Creative problem solving under pressure

• Commercial understanding

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills

Location: London

Anchor days in office: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday

Purpose of the role

To develop the marketing strategy and associated plans, through an integrated planning cycle, to deliver against business objectives, ensuring marketing is a primary growth engine of the organisation

Accountabilities

• Interpretation of Insight to understand the opportunities and threats related to the competitive landscape, target audience demographic, industry trends and economic factors.
• Development of comprehensive marketing strategies that meet the specific needs of customers, identify commercial opportunities and are aligned to Barclays' overall business objectives.
• Establishment of KPIs for marketing initiatives and define benchmarks for evaluating success.
• Communication of findings and recommendations utilising data-driven insights related to marketing strategies, campaign objectives, and performance results to senior management, internal teams, and external partners.
• Collaboration across the bank's departments to ensure the cohesive execution of marketing strategies, to promote the banks marketing goals and the efficient use of resources.
• Management of the marketing teams planning process in certain cases.
• Development of comm’s planning, including comm’s narrative and messaging hierarchy, where appropriate.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.