Brand Comms Manager
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Marketing
Closing date: 11 March 2026
Requisition ID: 400051174
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. We’re one of the biggest supermarkets in the UK with one of the largest websites. So marketing here really happens at scale. We move a lot faster than you’d think too, across Brand Planning, Brand Comms and Creative, Digital Marketing, CRM and Loyalty, Nectar 360, Insights, and Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability. More people shopping with us each week means more interactions. And thanks to data insight, we understand customers in a way that almost nobody else does. We work alongside incredible brand partners and the best agencies around. So if you have a passion to learn, grow and experience new teams, come and explore it all with us.
Division/Dept.
Marketing: Brand Comms Argos and Habitat
Location
Flex (London and Home)
Reporting to
Head of Brand Comms
In a nutshell
The Brand Expression Manager is the brand guardian for all of our Argos and Habitat brands and plays an integral role in the delivery of creative excellence. They own the visual identities and brand toolkits for each brand and are responsible for influencing the rest of the business to ensure our brands show up in a consistent way to all of our customers and colleagues.
What you need to do
Own, develop and implement brand guidelines – masterbrand, sub-brands & packaging
- Accountable for keeping reviewing brand guidelines as relevant to ensure fit-for-purpose and aligned with business strategy and customer mindset
- Responsible for turning visual identities into effective brand guidelines – ensuring these are fit-for-purpose across channels, formats and business areas, paying particular attention to digital design
- Ensure all stakeholders (internal and external) are trained on delivering work that adheres to these
- Responsible for driving Tone of Voice and brand personality training programme across all brands
Own an effective brand governance process (Brand Clinic)
- Ensure Brand Clinics are fit-for-purpose, by being operationally efficient and results-oriented
- Provide a clear and consistent brand feedback in response to creative work – balancing protectionism of the brand with pragmatism and providing creative feedback in a motivating way
- Support multiple teams on ad-hoc brand queries outside of Brand Clinics
- Ensure all stakeholders (internal and external) are aware of and understand the value of the brand governance process
Lead brand development projects
- Work to identify and react when brand identities need to be reviewed, refreshed or evolved to deliver on brand and marketing strategy changes or opportunities to improve the effectiveness of our communications and content
- Project manage brand development projects, working cross-functionally with stakeholders across Commercial, Formats and Marketing teams
- Responsible for the creation of visual identities for our brands and sub-brands (in-house, via agency partners, or through a hybrid approach)
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Responsible for managing trademarks process, budgets and oppositions, working closely with Legal to drive clear outcomes that put our brand assets at the heart of decision making
Lead Distinctive Asset Research
- Work with agency partner to conduct regular Distinctive Asset Research to inform clear decision making for our brand
- Translate this insight into tangible results and use to form a clear direction for our brand assets
Engage and influence at all levels
- Being responsible for ensuring that marketing communications are developed on brand across all channels will require a substantial amount of proactive management of channels within and outside of your direct sphere of control. As such significant influencing ability will be required
- Build strong relationships with your peers and senior stakeholders across the business
What you need to know and show
- Experienced brand guardian, familiar with working on multiple brands across significant customer touchpoints
- Strong influencer and excellent stakeholder management, with ability to flex style to have the most impact
- Strong judgement in the face of ambiguity, experienced making complex decisions at pace without consultation
- Experienced in balancing protectionism of brand with pragmatism to deliver the best result for the brand, customer and client
- Excellent attention to detail including expertise in tone of voice, logos, photography guidelines etc.
- Ability to work at pace and to balance multiple projects – both short and longer term
- Experienced in reviewing creative for multiple marketing channels and in adapting creative for specific channels
- Strong presentation skills, ability to flex style based on the audience / message.
- Experience in using data and insight to tell a story
- Relentless pursuit of Creative Excellence
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Inspiring leadership required to rally stakeholders behind the cause
What decisions I can make including budget
- Significant decisions on the visual identity of the Argos, and Habitat brands, and relevant sub-brands
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Significant brand governance decisions
Resources Available to me
- Access to Zest Creative Agency to support with visualisation / development of new creative identities
- Access to creative and insight agencies
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
