Role Summary
The Brand Marketing Manager owns the day-to-day stewardship and growth of Shangri-La's owned brand portfolio. This role translates brand strategy into campaigns, product launches, packaging, and in-market activation - and serves as the single point of accountability for brand consistency across retail, wholesale, and digital channels.
This is a builder's role, not a caretaker's. The portfolio is young, the brand standards are still being codified, and the campaign calendar is being written for the first time. The right person is equally comfortable presenting a positioning framework to executive leadership and personally writing the product copy, briefing the designer, and walking a dispensary shelf to see whether the work landed.
Key Responsibilities
Brand Strategy & Positioning
• Own and evolve brand positioning, architecture, and tier differentiation across Shangri-La dispensaries and product brands: Borealis, Asteroid, and Loud, including clear delineation of where each brand competes and who it is for.
• Maintain and enforce brand guidelines across every touchpoint: packaging, retail, wholesale collateral, digital, social, and in-store merchandising.
• Build and manage the annual brand campaign calendar against key demand windows (4/20, summer, fall, Green Wednesday, holiday), including budget allocation by brand and window.
• Translate consumer, category, and competitive insight into positioning recommendations that leadership can act on.
Campaign Development & Execution
• Develop campaign platforms from concept through in-market execution - creative brief, messaging hierarchy, asset requirements, channel plan, and post-campaign read.
• Design core concept creative, write and edit brand and product copy, including brand guides, product one-pagers, budtender education materials, and packaging copy.
• Brief and direct internal design resource and outside freelancers; manage creative timelines and rounds of review to on-time delivery. Complete graphic design and production work as needed.
• Partner with the digital team to adapt campaign platforms into paid, owned, email, SMS, and social executions.
Product Launch & Innovation
• Own the go-to-market plan for every new SKU and cultivar launch: naming, positioning, packaging, launch assets, sell-in materials, and education.
• Partner with cultivation, production, and wholesale leadership on the innovation roadmap, including format and formulation decisions that need to lock ahead of procurement deadlines.
• Build repeatable launch playbooks so each market launch gets faster and more consistent than the last.
Packaging & Asset Governance
• Manage packaging development and revisions end to end - dielines, artwork, state-required panel elements, and printer coordination.
• Maintain the brand asset library and the distribution workflow that gets approved assets to retail, wholesale, and partner teams without chasing.
• Audit in-market materials on a recurring basis and correct drift from brand standards.
Cross-Functional Partnership
• Partner daily with Retail Marketing, Wholesale Marketing and the Director of Sales & Retail Operations on sell-in narratives, retail + trade programs, and dispensary merchandising.
• Partner with Retail Marketing and Retail Operations to ensure owned brands are represented consistently and compellingly on our own shelves.
• Serve as the brand voice in joint-venture and white-label conversations, protecting brand standards regardless of who is producing the product.
Brand Health & Reporting
• Own brand health reporting - distribution quality, velocity, advocacy, brand pull, and social - and translate the numbers into a clear point of view on what to do next.
• Track campaign and launch performance against defined objectives; present results and recommendations to the Director of Marketing and executive leadership.
• Monitor competitive activity across CT, MO, and OH and flag shifts that warrant a portfolio or pricing response.
Compliance
• Ensure all brand work meets state cannabis advertising and packaging regulations in every market where it will appear.
• Route all materials through the compliance review workflow before print, sales floor placement, or external distribution.
• Stay current on regulatory changes that affect claims, potency language, packaging, and promotional activity.
Required Qualifications
• 5-7+ years of graphic design, brand management or brand marketing experience, including direct ownership of a brand or brand portfolio.
• Demonstrated ownership of the full campaign lifecycle - from brief and budget through in-market execution and performance read.
• Experience managing multi-brand or multi-tier portfolios, with a track record of holding meaningful differentiation between brands.
• Hands-on product launch and packaging development experience, including working directly with designers and printers.
• Experience briefing and managing creative resources - internal designers, agencies, or freelancers.
• Comfort working with sell-through, velocity, and market share data, and the ability to turn it into a recommendation rather than a report.
• Strong project management skills with proven capacity to run multiple concurrent launches and campaigns against fixed dates.
• Excellent writing and presentation skills; able to present to and defend a point of view with executive leadership.
• Thrives in a lean, fast-moving organization - strategic enough to set direction, hands-on enough to execute it personally.
• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Must be 21 years of age or older and able to pass all state-required background checks and obtain any required agent registration.
Preferred Qualifications
• Cannabis industry brand experience strongly preferred, particularly with a multi-state operator or a cannabis CPG brand sold through wholesale distribution.
• Working knowledge of Connecticut, Missouri, and/or Ohio cannabis advertising, packaging, and promotional regulations.
• Familiarity with cannabis data and commerce platforms such as Pistil, Headset, BDSA, Dutchie, Surfside, or Sparkplug.
• Experience launching a brand into a new state market.
• Category knowledge in solventless, concentrates, or vape.
• Working fluency in Adobe Creative Suite and/or Canva - enough to mark up creative precisely, not to replace the designer.
• Experience in another highly regulated consumer category (alcohol, tobacco, supplements, pharma) in lieu of cannabis.
Success in the First Six Months
• Brand guidelines for Borealis, Asteroid, and Loud are current, complete, and actively enforced; in-market drift has been identified and corrected.
• The brand campaign calendar is built, budgeted, and approved, with the first two campaigns executed and measured.
• A repeatable product launch playbook is documented and proven on at least one live SKU or cultivar launch.
• Brand health reporting is running on a regular cadence and being used in leadership decision-making.
• Wholesale and retail partners consistently have the approved assets they need, on time, without chasing them down.
• Clean compliance posture across all brand materials in every active market.
