Creative Director, Brand Systems & Packaging

Southern Graphic Systems, LLC; Cincinnati (OH); On-site; USD 145,000 - 155,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care plans

Dental plan

Vision plan

Life insurance

FSA/HSA

Disability

401(k)

Job summary

Marks is seeking a Creative Director, Brand & Packaging Design to lead the creation and evolution of brand systems across packaging, retail, digital, and beyond.

You will set the creative vision, guide multidisciplinary teams, and partner with Strategy and Client Services to turn business challenges into distinctive opportunities. 12+ years in brand and packaging, with a strong portfolio, are required.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in brand and packaging design.
• Outstanding portfolio demonstrating brand creation, identity systems, CPG packaging, and broader brand activation across channels.
• Proven experience leading multidisciplinary creative teams and developing senior creative talent.
• Strong strategic instincts and the ability to connect business, consumer, and brand objectives to creative solutions.
• Exceptional presentation and visual storytelling skills, with experience leading senior-level client conversations.
• Deep expertise in packaging production, photography, CGI, content creation, and the realities of bringing creative ideas to market.

Responsibilities

• Set and champion the creative vision for brands across identity, packaging, and the broader consumer experience.
• Translate strategy, consumer insight, culture, and business objectives into distinctive creative ideas and brand systems.
• Think beyond individual executions to create ownable, scalable brand worlds with clear principles for how they behave.
• Protect the core idea from concept through execution, ensuring creative integrity across every expression of the brand.
• Know when to preserve brand equity, when to evolve it, and when to challenge conventions entirely.
• Lead the creation of holistic brand systems designed to work across packaging, retail, shopper, digital, social, content, campaigns, and emerging channels.
• Bring deep expertise in CPG and packaging design, including portfolio architecture, shelf impact, consumer navigation, and the realities of bringing packaging to market.
• Guide teams in translating core brand equities into flexible visual and verbal systems
• Connect the right disciplines and specialists from strategy and copy to photography, CGI, motion, production, and engineering, to build richer brand experiences.
• Ensure systems are both creatively ambitious and practical enough to scale.
• Serve as a trusted creative authority and senior partner to clients.
• Lead presentations, workshops, and creative conversations with clarity, confidence, and a compelling point of view.
• Understand the client's business deeply enough to challenge briefs, reframe problems, and identify opportunities beyond the immediate ask.
• Navigate feedback constructively, balancing client objectives with consumer needs and creative ambition.
• Partner with Strategy and Client Services to shape stronger briefs, approaches, and creative narratives.
• Lead and inspire multidisciplinary creative teams, establishing clear direction while creating space for others to do their best work.
• Develop Designers, Design Directors and other creative roles through coaching, feedback, and meaningful ownership.
• Lead creative reviews that sharpen ideas, resolve ambiguity, and move the work decisively forward.
• Maintain a high bar for conceptual thinking, storytelling, design craft, and execution.
• Create a culture of curiosity, accountability, generosity, and creative ambition.
• Stay close enough to the work to recognize when it needs intervention and roll up your sleeves when your contribution can meaningfully elevate the outcome.
• Champion new technologies and ways of working that improve how creative ideas are developed, explored, and delivered.
• Drive thoughtful adoption of AI-assisted creative workflows to expand exploration, accelerate visualization, and reduce low-value friction without replacing creative thinking, judgment, or craft.
• Encourage experimentation while helping establish responsible standards and best practices.
• Continuously look for opportunities to make the creative process smarter, faster, and more ambitious.
• Partner with Client Services and creative leadership to align creative ambition with scope, timing, resources, and business realities.
• Recognize opportunities to deepen client relationships and proactively bring forward ideas that create value beyond the brief.
• Play a meaningful creative leadership role in pitches, proposals, and new business.
• Collaborate across Marks disciplines, studios, and capabilities to bring the best of the agency to each challenge.
• Contribute to the creative reputation, culture, and continued evolution of Marks.
• You are a brand thinker with a designer's eye and a leader's mindset.
• You can look at a business challenge and see the bigger brand opportunity. You understand packaging as one of the most powerful expressions of a brand. And you can envision how that same brand idea comes alive everywhere else.
• You have a strong creative point of view without needing to be the person who has every idea. You know how to recognize great thinking, make it better, and build consensus around it.
• You are energized by complexity: different categories, different channels, different disciplines, and different personalities. You bring clarity to all of it.
• And above all, you care deeply about the idea, the craft, and the people making it.

Skills

Brand leadership

Packaging design

Creative direction

Strategic thinking

Team leadership

Client leadership

Presentation & storytelling

Adobe Creative Suite

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Adobe Creative Suite

Presentation tools

Job description

Marks is seeking a Creative Director, Brand & Packaging Design to lead the creation and evolution of brand systems across packaging, retail, digital, and beyond.

You will set the creative vision, guide multidisciplinary teams, and partner with Strategy and Client Services to turn business challenges into distinctive opportunities. 12+ years in brand and packaging, with a strong portfolio, are required.