Senior Manager, Brand Strategy

Your opportunity

At Schwab, you’re empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us “challenge the status quo” and transform the finance industry together.

Schwab’s Brand Team is driven by a deep commitment to integrity, clarity, and trust. We steward one of the most respected brands in financial services by helping people feel confident in their financial futures and ensuring Schwab shows up consistently and authentically wherever customers engage with us.

As Senior Manager of Brand Strategy, you will define, evolve, and govern Schwab’s enterprise brand narrative. You will shape the systems, stories, and guardrails that ensure our brand is clearly understood, consistently expressed, and trusted across audiences, channels, partners, leaders, and AI mediated experiences. This role is pivotal in making Schwab’s brand future ready by enabling both human-led and machine-driven experiences to reflect our brand meaning accurately and at scale.

Partnering closely with the Director of Brand Strategy and Expression, you will provide a strong, scalable narrative foundation that empowers teams to move faster with confidence while safeguarding brand integrity. While connected to visual brand efforts, this role is distinctly narrative focused, centered on clarity, structure, and long-term brand stewardship as technology, customer expectations, and the business continue to evolve.

What you’ll Do

Brand Strategy and Narrative Architecture

• Partner with the Director of Brand Strategy & Expression to define and evolve Schwab’s brand architecture, with a focus on narrative systems rather than visual expression.
• Maintain enterprise ownership of Schwab’s brand narrative system, ensuring the strategy and story are clearly articulated and consistently applied.
• Shape and steward brand narratives for key audiences including clients, employees, leaders, and partners, while keeping the overall experience cohesive.
• Ensure Schwab’s brand remains clear, differentiated, and trusted as it scales across businesses, platforms, and emerging technologies.
• Design and evolve narrative systems that are readable and interpretable by AI so brand meaning is reflected consistently across AI‑driven experiences such as search, assistants, and generative interfaces.

Brand Governance & Standards

• Own governance for brand narrative, claims, proof points, and messaging frameworks.
• Define narrative guardrails and AI‑ready standards that enable teams to move quickly while staying aligned to the Schwab brand.
• Provide strategic guidance on narrative application for major initiatives such as product launches, integrations, and enterprise transformations.
• Train and enable teams on narrative standards, best practices, and decision frameworks.
• Define and maintain AI‑ready brand standards, including structured messaging frameworks, metadata, and narrative signals used in generative environments.
• Partner with technology, data, and digital teams to embed brand guardrails into AI systems, tools, and workflows.
• Establish testing and validation approaches to ensure AI‑generated content aligns with Schwab’s brand voice, narrative integrity, and regulatory expectations.

Cross‑Functional Partnership and Activation

• Collaborate closely with digital, UX, creative, and experience teams to clarify messaging, narrative flow, and proof points across key customer journeys.
• Partner with sales, marketing, agency, and relationship teams to translate brand strategy into clear, client‑focused messaging.
• Support enterprise and executive communications by helping shape leadership narratives for major moments such as strategy shifts, integrations, and transformations.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to stakeholders by simplifying complex ideas into clear, aligned storytelling.
• Collaborate with AI and digital teams to pilot and scale AI‑enabled brand applications while maintaining narrative quality and accuracy.

Stakeholder Leadership & Influence

• Build and maintain strong relationships with senior leadership, marketing partners, digital teams, agencies, and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Present Brand narrative strategy, guidance, and progress to senior leaders with clarity and confidence.
• Act as a point of escalation for narrative-related questions, risks, or ambiguities in partnership with the Brand Director.
• Balance depth and breadth by knowing when to go deep on complex challenges and when to guide at a systems level.

Future‑Focused Brand Strategy

• Stay current on industry trends, narrative and storytelling models, and best practices in brand governance.
• Apply a practical, AI‑minded lens to brand architecture to support both human understanding and machine interpretation.
• Explore how Schwab’s brand should show up in emerging AI‑driven environments, including conversational and generative experiences.
• Lead test‑and‑learn efforts to evaluate brand performance in AI‑mediated contexts and refine systems over time.
• Recommend and help implement tools and frameworks that strengthen narrative clarity and brand trust.

AI and Narrative Systems Leadership

• Define how brand meaning translates into structured inputs such as prompts, taxonomies, and semantic frameworks.
• Ensure alignment between brand strategy and AI outputs through ongoing monitoring and refinement.
• Serve as a strategic advisor at the intersection of brand, narrative systems, and AI across the enterprise.

What you have

To ensure that we have fulfilled our promise of "challenging the status quo," this role has specific qualifications that successful candidates should have.

Required Qualifications:

• 5–10+ years of experience in brand strategy, brand architecture, narrative strategy, or related disciplines.
• Exceptional writing, storytelling, and presentation skills, with the ability to simplify complex ideas into clear, actionable guidance.
• Strong understanding of how brands operate as systems, including narrative, claims, and proof frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Data-oriented and synthesis-driven, with comfort navigating research and insight without losing strategic focus.
• Experience working in large, matrixed organizations with complex stakeholder environments.
• Familiarity with AI-driven content, tools, or systems, and an understanding of how Brand translates into machine-mediated experiences.