Head of Brand Marketing

📋 Description

• • Own Cohere’s brand strategy, defining who the company is, what it stands for, and what it refuses to be, ensuring all public surfaces—from product launches to sales decks to recruiting materials—ladder up to a unified master narrative without becoming repetitive or flat.
• • Set and maintain Cohere’s verbal identity framework, including voice, tone, copy systems, and naming conventions, providing the foundation for the Editorial Director to execute voice across long-form published content.
• • Partner closely with the Design Director as a joint creative counterpart to set strategic direction, co-brief creative work, and serve as a mutual taste filter on all high-impact brand outputs, ensuring alignment between verbal and visual identity.
• • Lead the vision and strategy for integrated brand campaigns that generate cultural resonance, drive awareness, reframe the AI category, and earn lasting recognition—designing briefs that unite design, editorial, and social efforts into cohesive, shareable experiences.
• • Curate Cohere’s cultural calendar by identifying and selecting high-impact events, festivals, publications, and collaborations where presence matters more than volume, prioritizing selective, meaningful partnerships over broad sponsorship.
• • Develop and execute brand partnerships with artists, designers, publications, or institutions whose audiences align with Cohere’s target segments, ensuring every collaboration enhances brand credibility and cultural relevance.
• • Shape how Cohere shows up in physical space: overseeing event design, office and lobby experiences, signage, merch, gifts, and exhibitions—with merch treated as brand expression, only produced if it’s something you’d personally wear.
• • Partner with the Social Lead to define how the brand engages in cultural moments across organic social channels, ensuring alignment with brand voice and strategic priorities on what to say, when, and how.
• • Influence Cohere’s editorial sensibility by collaborating with the Editorial Director to determine the cultural questions the brand engages with and the type of brand-level content that lands on owned channels, ensuring editorial and brand work move in the same direction.
• • Lead and grow a team of brand strategists, writers, and producers, fostering a creative culture grounded in high standards, constructive feedback, and conditions that enable exceptional work.
• • Manage relationships with external creative partners including agencies, studios, photographers, directors, illustrators, and casting teams, ensuring alignment with Cohere’s creative vision and quality expectations.
• • Measure brand success through aided and unaided awareness among developers, AI/ML leaders, and enterprise tech buyers; brand consideration and preference vs. competitors; share of voice in key industry conversations; branded search volume; earned media quality; employer brand strength; and internal pride in brand output.
• • Ensure all brand work meets a qualitative standard: it must be good enough to be proud of putting in a book, not just correct or compliant.
• • Operate with strategic clarity in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment, balancing creative ambition with the realities of shipping in a technical B2B AI company.
• • Translate complex AI technology into human, emotional, and culturally resonant narratives that make engineers want to join, CIOs remember the name, and journalists choose to tell the story.
• • Maintain independent creative taste and cultural fluency—drawing from fashion, music, film, design, art, and internet culture—to infuse a consumer-grade sensibility into a B2B technical brand.
• • Partner across four key creative peers: Design Director, Editorial Director, Social Lead, and Integrated Marketing leader, fostering joint planning, shared briefs, and shared standards rather than a baton-pass relationship.
• • Ensure every brand decision reflects deep cultural awareness and purposeful curation, rejecting noise in favor of meaningful, memorable contributions to the cultural conversation.