Brand Communications and Creative Excellence Director

Breda, NL

Date: Sep 22, 2025

About Hero Group

Hero is a global food company focused on branded nutritional food products, founded in 1886 in Lenzburg, Switzerland, where its headquarters are still located today.

Hero operates in the Growing Up and Adult categories, which include three businesses: Better Snacking, Naturally Good Food and Others. Within these, we have a house of brands that provides our millions of consumers with trusted, nutritional food products.

Our brands include Hero, Corny. Goodies, Beech-Nut, Schwartau, Semper, Freche Freunde, Organix, Deliciously Ella, Sunar, Vitrac, Baby Gourmet, Queensberry, and Casa de Mateus. We are a company rooted in honest goodness.

While what we do has changed over time, how we do it and what we strive for remains the same – products made from high quality ingredients that taste great and are nutritionally balanced. We never stray away from our core belief that there is a better way, the Hero way.

We are on a mission to conserve what’s good in nature. We do so by striving to conduct our business sustainably and striving to do the right thing. Always. Without compromises.

We have around 4,000 team members. We believe our team members are what make our business special, and we hire extraordinary people to fulfil our extraordinary mission. We strive for high performance, and our values guide the way we work each day.

About The Role

The role of Brand Equity and Creative Excellence Director, reporting to the VP, Marketing Excellence, will play a key part in building strong and credible brands.

You will be responsible for building brands with a purpose as reflected in our brand foundations. In collaboration with our agency partners, you will be developing core creative ideas and campaign executions based on deep consumer insights, resulting in higher levels of engagement and supporting our growth ambitions. You will be working with local and global brand owners, supporting them through all key process steps.

Main Responsibilities

Consumer and Shopper Insights

• In collaboration with the I&A team and the brand owners, build a strong understanding of consumer and shopper behavior, the competitive landscape and market trends as the basis for the development of brand foundations and powerful creative ideas

Brand Positioning

• Engage with key internal stakeholders about the role and importance of building strong and meaningful brands. Elevate the role of brands within the organization.
• Where needed challenge and evolve the existing Hero models and processes for how we talk about brands and how we define our brands’ positioning.
• Based on identified and tested consumer and shopper insights develop brand positioning for new brands and evolve and refine the positioning of existing brands in collaboration with the local and global brand owners and with brand strategy agency partners.
• Capture the new positioning in the brand foundations documents to guarantee clear understanding of the brand positioning by all stakeholders and ensure consistency of execution across all touchpoints.
• Act as the owner of the brand’s foundations, making sure they are fully documented and up to date.

Creative Excellence Leadership

• Where needed challenge and evolve the existing Hero processes and ways of working with regards to brand communications.
• Develop and implement the overall creative strategy for the brands, as defined in the Core Creative Idea, ensuring alignment with the brands’ positioning as well as brand and business objectives.
• Oversee the development and execution of brand campaigns, ensuring they resonate with target audiences to reinforce brand equity and drive growth and ensuring consistency and excellence across all channels.
• Supervise the production of creative assets to warrant that the creative intent is being executed in the most effective and efficient way
• Ensure global brands campaigns are effectively adapted and executed across the different markets, balancing global consistency with local relevance when local adaptation is required.
• In collaboration with the I&A team and the brand owner develop a campaign learning plan, including pre- and post-testing

Brand Book & Guidelines

• Ensure brand books are created for all brands that include brand guidelines to guide consistency in the development and execution of brand communications across all relevant touchpoints.
• Use the brand book as a guide to govern consistency of execution over time and over regions.

Agency Operations (brand and creative)

• Where needed challenge and evolve the existing Hero processes and ways of working with regards to agency management with regards to brand strategy and creative agencies
• Define the right agency operating model: what are the agency capabilities that we need in support of our brand and communication strategies. Considering the role that Gen AI solutions can play
• Manage the selection process of global agency partners.
• Define the selection process for local agencies, actively support the selection process of local agency partners and take the final decision.
• Ongoing management of global agency partners.

Capability building

• Create and manage a community of local brand communications experts, where they exist.
• Provide recommendations with regards to in-house capabilities and organization.
• Build and enhance brand equity and creative excellence capabilities across the entire marketing organization, ensuring they have the tools and knowledge to execute effective marketing campaigns
• Organize the exchange of experience and best practice sharing to continuously evolve our learning.
• Be the representative of Hero in external forums and bring the outside in to make sure Hero is up to date with the latest industry trends and best practices.

Brand Management Governance

• Implement and, where needed make recommendations for improvements of, the brand governance model to build strong and credible brands and guarantee consistency in execution across all contact points and markets

Performance Metrics

• Work closely with the I&A department to evolve and implement the research methodologies and tools used during the brand positioning and creative processes (pre as well as post testing)
• Translate the generated insights into meaningful recommendations for brand building and creative development

Success measures

Success in this role is defined by the ability to elevate the role of brands throughout the entire organisation and by the ability to work with internal and external stakeholders to translate meaningful insights into purposeful and credible brand positionings and to leverage these brand positionings as a steppingstone for the creation of powerful content that helps build brand equity in a measurable and proven way.

What we need:

Functional experience:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in marketing, Business or a related field
• Proven track record in leading brand building and managing marketing communications within FMCG, with experience with Food & Beverages.
• Experience working in a matrix organization in an international environment.
• Agency or consultancy experience (account management, strategic planning, marketing research) needs to be complemented by solid experience working on the client side.
• English business level fluency is essential
• Additional languages (e.g. Spanish, German) are a plus
• Familiar with collaboration tools (e.g., Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint)
• Familiarity with creative tools (eg Adobe suite of tools) is a bonus, not a must
• Understanding of Gen AI tools for marketing is a bonus
• Experience with change management and capability building.

Skills Competencies:

• Brand building: Proven experience in building new brands or evolving the positioning of existing brands to better respond to the consumer and shopper needs
• Creative development and campaign management: Proven experience managing end-to-end crrative development and campaign operations for local and global brands.
• Media Experience: Good working understanding of the modern media landscape with focus on digital channels.
• Stakeholder Management: Confident working cross-functionally within complex global matrix organizations and influencing senior stakeholders
• Trend Translation: Capable of identifying external trends and converting them into strategic operational initiatives.
• Agency Operation: Deep understanding of Agency Models and experience in running (international) RFPs

Behavioural Competencies

• Communication Excellence: Articulates ideas clearly and with impact, from operational detail to executive-level messaging.
• Influencing skills: Can convey ideas clearly and convince senior stakeholders and generates buy in.
• Change Leadership: Leads through transformation, builds buy-in, and drives adoption across diverse teams.
• Collaboration & Influence: Navigates matrix structures, builds trusted relationships, and aligns stakeholders behind common goals.
• Problem Solving: Works analytically and pragmatically to resolve complexity and remove operational barriers.
• Resilience & Agility: Stays focused under pressure, adapts quickly, and balances structure with flexibility.
• Accountability: Takes ownership of outcomes, drives initiatives with a bias for action and follow-through.
• Passion: For our business, industry and our brands.

If this sounds like the right opportunity for you, we look forward to receiving your application

Good reasons to work for Hero

• A challenging, varied job with a lot of creative freedom in a successful company
• A modern workplace and an international team
• Flexible working hours and high independence within your area of responsibility
• Competitive employment and working conditions

More about us

We are an international food company that is passionate about good, natural food. Since our foundation in 1886, our ethos remains unchanged – making high quality, natural products that are easily available to consumers.

If the mix of strong Swiss roots with the international flair of a global corporation appeals to you, and you appreciate the freedom to work independently, then we should definitely get to know each other.

We are looking forward to receive your application via the button >.

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