Brand Strategist

Heads Up For Tails; Gurugram District; On-site; INR 2,500,000 - 4,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Heads Up For Tails is seeking a Brand Strategist to take the belonging idea from concept to a scalable brand system across stores, emails, onboarding, and community touchpoints.

You will drive cross-functional initiatives with marketing, retail, HR, product, CSR, and the HUFT Foundation, translating mission into a living brand that employees and customers can feel and embody.

Qualifications

• 8 to 9 years of experience in brand strategy, brand management, or brand planning.
• Proven ability to translate brand ideas into tangible, felt experiences across multiple touchpoints.
• Experience across both customer-facing and internal employer branding is a strong plus.
• Sharp strategic thinking with the ability to build frameworks and systems.
• Excellent storytelling and communication skills to rally diverse stakeholders.
• A genuine interest in building something at scale with ownership.

Responsibilities

• Own the strategic development and rollout of belonging and personalisation as a brand system across HUFT.
• Translate HUFT's mission and Foundation work into a coherent brand narrative that people understand and feel.
• Guard brand consistency across marketing, retail, HR, CSR, product, and customer experience.
• Identify touchpoints and bring belonging to life at each one with a plan.
• Partner with retail teams to shape in-store experience and human moments.
• Work with digital, CRM and product teams to integrate personalisation into the journey.
• Shape packaging, signage, and in-store communication for consistency.

Skills

Brand strategy

Brand management

Brand planning

Stakeholder management

Storytelling

Leadership

Ownership

Empathy for animals

Job description

Position Summary

HUFT is built on one idea: belonging. Not a tagline, a felt sense, that every pet, every pet parent, and every person who loves an animal has a place here. We're looking for a Brand Strategist to take that idea out of the deck and put it into everything, how a store greets you, how an email is worded, how a new employee is onboarded, how a stray is spoken about, how a customer is remembered on their second visit.

HUFT is built on one idea: belonging. Not a tagline, a felt sense, that every pet, every pet parent, and every person who loves an animal has a place here. We're looking for a Brand Strategist to take that idea out of the deck and put it into everything, how a store greets you, how an email is worded, how a new employee is onboarded, how a stray is spoken about, how a customer is remembered on their second visit.

This is not a role that lives in campaigns alone. It's a cross-functional role where belonging and personalisation become the thread that ties everything together, and you'll own that end to end, translating it into a system that works at scale, consistently, across every single place HUFT shows up. That includes customers, but also our own people, our stores, our community, and our Foundation. We're ideally looking for someone from a branding or brand strategy agency background, someone who has spent years helping other companies turn a brand idea into something people can see, touch, and feel, and now wants to build that inside a brand they actually believe in, in-house, at scale, with real ownership.

Responsibilities

Brand Strategy & Vision

• Own the strategic development and rollout of belonging and personalisation as a brand system across HUFT, from concept to scaled execution.
• Translate HUFT's mission and vision, including the work of the HUFT Foundation, into a coherent brand narrative that people actually understand and feel, not just read about.
• Act as the guardian of brand consistency across every function, marketing, retail, HR, CSR, product, and customer experience.

Bringing Brand to Life, Everywhere

• Identify and map every touchpoint where a customer, employee, or community member experiences HUFT, and build a plan to bring belonging to life at each one.
• Partner with retail teams to shape the in-store experience, from store design cues to the small human moments (a remembered name, a birthday acknowledged, a loss handled with grace).
• Work with digital, CRM and product teams to build personalisation into the customer journey, so a pet parent feels genuinely known, not just targeted.
• Shape packaging, signage, and in-store communication so the brand feels consistent from shelf to home.

Employer Branding & Internal Culture

• Partner with HR to build HUFT's employer brand, so employees experience the same sense of belonging we promise customers, from onboarding to everyday culture.
• Champion internal communication that helps every employee, not just marketing, understand and live the brand's vision and mission.

Community & Loyalty

• Work closely with the community and CSR teams to grow initiatives like HUFT Tribe, HUFT Insiders, and local community events, ensuring they all ladder up to one coherent brand experience.
• Help build and strengthen customer loyalty programmes rooted in genuine relationship, not just transactions.

Cross-functional Leadership

• Partner with the Brand Lead and teams across marketing, retail, HR, product, and CSR to align every initiative to the brand idea.
• Bring outside-in thinking, sharp strategic frameworks, and the discipline of an agency background to a fast-moving, in-house environment.
• Measure what belonging actually looks like in the business, through customer feedback, retention, community growth, and employee sentiment, and use it to sharpen the strategy continuously.

Qualifications, Skills And Competencies

• 8 to 9 years of experience in brand strategy, brand management, or brand planning, ideally with meaningful time spent at a branding or brand strategy agency.
• A strong track record of translating a brand idea into tangible, felt experiences across multiple touchpoints, not just campaigns or communication.
• Experience working across both customer-facing and internal (employer/culture) branding is a strong plus.
• Sharp strategic thinking, with the ability to build frameworks and systems, not just one-off ideas.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, comfortable working across marketing, retail, HR, product, and leadership.
• Excellent storytelling and communication skills, able to get a room of very different stakeholders to rally around one idea.
• A genuine interest in building something at scale, and enough ownership instinct to see it through, not just plan it.
• Compassion for animals and an understanding of what pet parenthood means to people is a strong plus.

What Heads Up For Tails Can Offer You

With an omni-channel network of manufacturing, retail, e-commerce and distribution, Heads Up For Tails offers a dynamic and ambitious work environment where you can put brand strategy to work on real, meaningful problems, not just present it in a deck. This is a rare chance to build a brand idea from the inside, across culture, community, stores, and customers, with the ownership and autonomy of someone founding something new. We offer a culture that thrives on ownership and initiative, where people excited about the path less travelled will thrive and succeed.

Skills: brand management,brand planning,brand strategy