Job Description

Your Role

The Brand Strategy team develops, manages, and maintains the company's brand identity, ensuring consistency across all customer touchpoints and alignment with business goals. The team shapes how the brand is perceived by customers, employees, and the broader market. The Brand Strategist Principal will report to the Senior Director, Brand and Demand Marketing. In this role you will serve as a senior strategic leader responsible for advancing the brand's vision, positioning, and narrative, ensuring alignment with business goals and market opportunities. You will engage with leadership, collaborate with strategists and creative teams, and guide cross functional partners to maintain a cohesive and high impact and agile brand presence.

Our leadership model is about developing great leaders at all levels and creating opportunities for our people to grow - personally, professionally, and financially. We are looking for leaders that are energized by creative and critical thinking, building and sustaining high-performing teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.

Responsibilities

Your Work

In this role, you will:

• Lead the integration, integrity, and consistency of the Blue Shield brand ensuring it shows up powerfully and cohesively across all channels and touchpoints
• Drive the Blue Shield brand to further enhance the branding of products and services, while incorporating analysis of current market data and trends
• Shape and influence brand elements, tone, and expression, ensuring they reflect the company's mission, values, and strategic direction
• Lead the development of strategic briefs that translate brand strategy into clear, actionable direction for creative teams - transforming business needs into compelling creative opportunities
• Apply research, information, and insights distilling down into a single strategic idea for our creative team and marketing partners to operate from
• Align annual Brand planning with the marketing playbook planning cycle, ensuring brand strategy is embedded in organizational priorities and planning rhythms
• Guide major brand initiatives and integrated marketing campaigns by driving a full-funnel approach that aligns Brand across growth and member marketing through strong cross-functional partnerships
• Own enterprise-level brand positioning, architecture, visual identity, and messaging frameworks to drive clarity and differentiation across the organization
• Set and steward enterprise brand standards, ensuring consistent application across all internal teams and external partners
• Partner closely with marketing, product, sales, and executive teams to ensure brand alignment across initiatives and reinforce a unified brand experience
• Partner closely with digital and measurement teams to monitor campaign performance, brand preference and other KPIs to ensure optimal campaign performance

Qualifications

Your Knowledge and Experience

• Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• Requires at least 10 years of prior relevant experience
• Requires in-depth knowledge of health plans and insurance products and services
• Requires strong command of brand marketing principles, frameworks, and best practices, brand strategy development and enhancement including B2B/B2C marketing experience
• Requires experience in marketing project management at both strategic and tactical levels, with the ability to engage with executive leadership
• Requires experience creating executive level presentations
• Strong business acumen with advanced critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making expertise in collaboration with creative teams and cross-functional stakeholders, driving clarity when and where needed

Hybrid

This role requires employees to be in-office based on our hybrid workplace model, balancing purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility. For most teams, this means coming into the office two days each week.

Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location will work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.

About the Team

About Blue Shield of California

As of January 2025, Blue Shield of California became a subsidiary of Ascendiun. Ascendiun is a nonprofit corporate entity that is the parent to a family of organizations including Blue Shield of California and its subsidiary, Blue Shield of California Promise Health Plan; Altais, a clinical services company; and Stellarus, a company designed to scale healthcare solutions. Together, these organizations are referred to as the Ascendiun Family of Companies.

At Blue Shield of California, our mission is to create a healthcare system worthy of our family and friends and sustainably affordable. We are transforming health care in a way that genuinely serves our nonprofit mission by lowering costs, improving quality, and enhancing the member and physician experience.

To achieve our mission, we foster an environment where all employees can thrive and contribute fully to address the needs of the various communities we serve. We are committed to creating and maintaining a supportive workplace that upholds our values and advances our goals.

Blue Shield is a U.S. News Best Company to work for, a Deloitte U.S. Best Managed Company and a Top 100 Inspiring Workplace. We were recognized by Fair360 as a Top Regional Company, and one of the 50 most community-minded companies in the United States by Points of Light. Here at Blue Shield, we strive to make a positive change across our industry and communities - join us!

Our Values:

• Honest. We hold ourselves to the highest ethical and integrity standards. We build trust by doing what we say we're going to do and by acknowledging and correcting where we fall short.
• Human. We strive to listen and communicate effectively, showing empathy by understanding others' perspectives.
• Courageous. We stand up for what we believe in and are committed to the hard work necessary to achieve our ambitious goals.

Our Workplace Model

We believe in fostering a workplace environment that balances purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility - providing clear expectations while respecting the diverse needs of our workforce. Our workplace model is designed around intentional in-person interaction, collaboration, connection, creativity and flexibility:

• For most teams, this means coming into the office two days per week.
• Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location, out of state employees, and employees in certain member-facing roles should work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.
• For employees with medical conditions that may impact their ability to work in-office, we are committed to engaging in an interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to ensure their work environment is conducive to their success and well-being.

The Company reserves the right to require more presence in the office based on business needs, and requirements are subject to change with periodic reviews.

Physical Requirements:

Office Environment - roles involving part to full time schedule in Office Environment. Based in our physical offices and work from home office/deskwork - Activity level: Sedentary, frequency most of work day.

Please click here for further physical requirement detail.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

External hires must pass a background check/drug screen. Qualified applicants with arrest records and/or conviction records will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with Federal, State and local laws, including but not limited to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, protected veteran status or disability status and any other classification protected by Federal, State and local laws.