STRATEGIST

Thinkjoseph; Orange (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

JOSEPH is a strategic marketing advisory firm based in Orange County, California. We seek a Strategist who will tackle questions about brands, customers, competition, and growth, translating findings into clear recommendations for clients.

You will work with Principals and clients from first questions through final recommendations, ensuring the problem is understood deeply, the important matters are found, and complexity is made clear.

Qualifications

• We are looking for strategists with experience in marketing strategy, strategy consulting, brand strategy, consumer insights, research, growth strategy, or adjacent disciplines.
• Comfort conducting research, working with data and qualitative information, developing strategic arguments, and communicating ideas clearly.
• Experience presenting or contributing directly to client or leadership conversations is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Help structure complex marketing questions into clear strategic problems.
• Conduct and synthesize research across customers, markets, competitors, categories, and culture.
• Analyze qualitative and quantitative information to identify meaningful patterns.
• Develop hypotheses and determine what evidence would prove or challenge them.
• Contribute to positioning, customer, competitive, and growth strategy.
• Identify insights that change how we understand a problem.
• Develop strategic alternatives and evaluate the tradeoffs between them.
• Build arguments that connect evidence to recommendation.
• Turn complex findings into clear strategic narratives.
• Create presentations that make the thinking understandable and persuasive.
• Participate directly in client conversations and working sessions.

Skills

Strategic thinking

Research analysis

Client communication

Cross-functional

Problem solving

Job description

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THE OPPORTUNITY

The work starts with the question.

THE ROLE

JOSEPH is looking for a Strategist to help solve the strategic questions behind brands, customers, competition, and growth.

Strategists are at the center of the work.

You will investigate markets, understand customers, study competitors, challenge assumptions, develop hypotheses, and turn what you learn into a clear point of view about what a client should do next.

You won't simply support someone else's thinking.

You will be expected to think.

Working alongside Principals and directly with clients, you will contribute to engagements from the first question through the final recommendation.

The standard is high: understand the problem deeply, find what matters, and make the complicated clear.

THE WORK

Most of the questions we work on do not arrive with obvious answers.

Where should this brand compete?

Why are customers choosing someone else?

What position can the company credibly own?

Where is the next source of growth?

Which customer should matter most?

What should the organization stop doing?

Your job is to help find the answer.

That means going beyond surface-level observations. You will investigate the situation, interrogate the evidence, recognize patterns, test competing explanations, and determine what those findings mean for the decision in front of us.

Research gives us information.

Analysis gives us understanding.

Strategy determines what we do about it.

Your job is to connect the three.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Help structure complex marketing questions into clear strategic problems.
• Conduct and synthesize research across customers, markets, competitors, categories, and culture.
• Analyze qualitative and quantitative information to identify meaningful patterns.
• Develop hypotheses and determine what evidence would prove or challenge them.
• Contribute to positioning, customer, competitive, and growth strategy.
• Identify insights that change how we understand a problem.
• Develop strategic alternatives and evaluate the tradeoffs between them.
• Build arguments that connect evidence to recommendation.
• Turn complex findings into clear strategic narratives.
• Create presentations that make the thinking understandable and persuasive.
• Participate directly in client conversations and working sessions.
• Collaborate with Principals, Associates, and Research Analysts throughout engagements.
• Contribute your own point of view—not simply document someone else's.
• Help strengthen JOSEPH's methods, thinking, and intellectual body of work.

THE STANDARD

We are looking for people who think beyond the obvious.

You are naturally curious about why things happen, why people choose what they choose, why some companies win while others struggle, and what might be different tomorrow than it is today.

But curiosity alone isn't enough.

You can take a large amount of information and determine what matters.

You recognize patterns without forcing them.

You distinguish evidence from assumption.

You can move between details and the larger strategic question without losing either.

And eventually, you can say:

This is what we believe. This is why. And this is what we should do about it.

That's the standard.

HOW YOU THINK

You ask good questions.

Then you ask better ones.

You don't accept the first explanation simply because it sounds reasonable.

You want to understand what is underneath it.

You are comfortable exploring competing possibilities and disciplined enough to follow the evidence rather than the answer you hoped to find.

You know that a surprising insight is valuable only when it changes the decision.

You can disagree without becoming difficult.

You can defend your thinking without becoming attached to it.

You are comfortable saying you don't know.

And then figuring it out.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We are interested in strategists with experience in marketing strategy, strategy consulting, brand strategy, consumer insights, research, growth strategy, or adjacent disciplines.

You should be comfortable conducting research, working with data and qualitative information, developing strategic arguments, and communicating ideas clearly.

Experience working on complex strategic questions is valuable.

Experience presenting or contributing directly to client or leadership conversations is strongly preferred.

We are hiring the person behind it.

Where you worked matters less than what you learned there, how you think now, and what you are capable of becoming.

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This is not a social media strategy role.

It is not campaign planning.

It is not account management.

It is not a position where your primary responsibility is coordinating deliverables between clients and an execution team.

And it is not a role where the answer has already been decided and your job is to make the deck.

At JOSEPH, the answer is often still unknown when the engagement begins.

Finding it is the work.

WHY JOSEPH

JOSEPH is being built around the idea that great strategy begins with great thinking.

That creates a different kind of opportunity for a Strategist.

You will work close to the problem.

Close to the research.

Close to senior strategists.

And close to the people making the decision.

You will see how strategic arguments are developed, challenged, strengthened, and ultimately turned into recommendations.

And increasingly, you will be expected to develop those arguments yourself.

There are fewer layers here.

That means more responsibility earlier—and greater opportunity to develop the judgment required to become an exceptional advisor.

HOW YOU'LL GROW

We don't believe strategists become better strategists by simply producing more strategy documents.

They get better by encountering difficult questions and learning how to think through them.

You will learn how to frame problems before solving them.

How to design research around a decision rather than collect information for its own sake.

How to recognize when an insight actually matters.

How to distinguish a plausible recommendation from a defensible one.

How to communicate a point of view to senior decision-makers.

And eventually, how to walk into ambiguity and create direction.

The goal isn't simply to teach you how JOSEPH thinks.

It's to develop the judgment to think for yourself.

COMPENSATION

JOSEPH intends to attract exceptional people and compensate them accordingly.

Compensation for this position will be competitive and commensurate with experience, capabilities, and the scope of responsibility.

Specific compensation and benefits will be discussed during the interview process and reflected in the final offer as applicable.

LOCATION

JOSEPH is based in Orange County, California.

The nature of our work requires close collaboration with firm leadership, colleagues, and clients. Specific working arrangements and expectations will be discussed during the interview process.

ABOUT JOSEPH

JOSEPH is a strategic marketing advisory firm.

We help leadership make the choices that shape positioning, customers, competition, and growth.

We work upstream of execution—where the problem is defined, priorities are established, tradeoffs are made, and direction is determined.

Our job is not to add complexity.

It is to reduce it.

Know Your Move.

READY TO MAKE YOUR MOVE?

We want to understand how you think, what you've done,and what you could bring to the work.

Applications are reviewed directly by JOSEPH.

Know Your Move. Strategy begins with understanding where you stand, where you’re going, and the choices that will get you there.