Director of Strategic Marketing

The Director of Strategic Marketing owns the strategy and planning layer of the marketing org - the seat that decides where marketing plays and how it wins, and turns that into a plan the whole function executes against. They report to a VP of Marketing / CMO (../071_VP_of_Marketing/../073_CMO/) and are accountable for the strategic spine: the market, competitive, and segment analysis; the positioning and go-to-market strategy at the org level; the integrated marketing plan and its OKRs; market-entry and expansion strategy; the cross-functional strategic initiatives that cross channel lanes; and the marketing portfolio prioritization that decides what is funded, sequenced, or cut. They may lead a small strategy-and-planning team - strategy and market-intelligence analysts, a planning manager - but the leverage is the analysis and the plan, not channel throughput. The distinguishing altitude is that this is a strategy-and-planning owner, not an execution engine and not the general operating director. The execution Directors sit beside this seat, not under it: a Director of Growth (../088_Director_of_Growth/) owns the experimentation engine - the growth model, the test backlog, experiment velocity; a Director of Account Based Marketing (../087_Director_of_Account_Based_Marketing/) owns account orchestration - target-account selection execution, the account plays, and account-level sales alignment. This Director sets the strategy and the plan those engines run against; it does not run the loop or the plays. The seam most easily blurred is with the Marketing Director (../100_Marketing_Director/): that seat is the general operating director who runs the whole marketing operation - the channels, the day-to-day cadence, and delivery across the board; this seat owns the analytical and planning charter specifically - the market read, the positioning, the plan, the OKRs, and the portfolio call. Same org, different mandate: one runs marketing, one plans it. What separates great from average is making the plan a set of real choices, grounded in evidence, that the whole org can execute and measure - not a strategy deck that dies on contact with the quarter. A mediocre director produces a market-trends deck, lists every plausible initiative, and calls it a strategy; a great one reads the market to a defensible thesis, names the segments and motions marketing will and will not bet on, builds one integrated plan with OKRs every channel ladders to, prioritizes the portfolio so the plan chooses instead of piling on, and defends the where-to-play call to the VP and the execution Directors in evidence, not opinion. The output is never a trends deck - it is a plan the marketing org runs on and a strategy leadership chose on purpose.