Strategy Director - Loyalty Consulting

Collinson is the global leader in travel experiences and customer engagement, a business that builds loyalty 500 million times a day, across 140 countries, for some of the world's most ambitious brands. Our clients include major financial institutions, airlines, transport operators and retailers who trust us to design programmes that move customers from passive participation to genuine, measurable commitment.

Our loyalty practice sits at the intersection of behavioural strategy, data science and programme design. We believe that the best loyalty programmes are strategic assets - not cost centres - and we've built our methodology around the evidence: that incrementality, not points balances, is the true measure of a programme's worth.

Recent mandates include the design and delivery of large-scale loyalty and customer engagement programmes across the transport, mobility and travel sectors. These are complex, high-stakes initiatives involving multiple stakeholders, significant commercial value and innovative customer propositions. They represent exactly the kind of work this role will be asked to support and lead.

Purpose of the job

This is a senior strategy hire into our consulting business. You will work closely with the VP, Loyalty Consulting, owning major client workstreams from inception to delivery - leading the thinking, shaping the narrative, and ensuring that every piece of work reflects the depth and rigour that our clients require.

This is a strategy role that takes data seriously. We are evidence-led in everything we do: the commercial case for a programme lives or dies on the quality of the insight behind it, and the best strategic work here is built on a genuine understanding of what the numbers are saying. You don't need to be a data scientist, but you need to be someone who reaches for the evidence first, who asks the right questions of analysts, and who knows how to turn data into a compelling strategic argument.

Equally, this role requires genuine creativity. Loyalty strategy is not a formula. The leap from insight to a proposition that will change customer behaviour, or from a client's commercial problem to a programme design that solves it, requires imagination as much as rigour. We are looking for someone who can make those leaps, who produces work that surprises clients in the best possible way.

As a team, we are operating in a rapidly maturing loyalty landscape: nearly 70% of programmes are now over three years old, confidence in ROI is still patchy (only two-thirds of operators are fully confident in their measurement), and the gap between psychological design intent and actual execution is significant - fewer than a third of operators actively design for emotional connection. The consequence is that we are continually evolving our thinking and approach, and you will help us continually challenges ourselves to understand of the landscape and bring that thinking to bear in service of our clients and prospects.

Key Responsibilities

Client strategy and programme design

· Lead strategy development across major loyalty accounts, from initial diagnostic and opportunity sizing through to programme design, commercial modelling and go-to-market planning

· Own the strategic narrative on client engagements - structuring complex problems, commissioning research and data analysis, synthesising those findings into clear recommendations, and presenting with confidence at senior levels

· Work with and enhance existing frameworks for programme evaluation including commercial modelling, incrementality modelling, headroom analysis, share-of-wallet assessment and behavioural segmentation

· Lead workshop design and facilitation with clients, from discovery sessions that surface the real commercial question, through to strategic alignment workshops that get the right people in the room making the right decisions

· Have a point of view on what good looks like: understand how the strongest long-term programmes (Clubcard, Avios, Nectar, others) have stayed relevant, how non-traditional models are working (M&S Sparks) and how that applies to the client and prospect challenges we are exploring

Experience & Skills

Experience

· Experience in loyalty, CRM, consulting or customer engagement strategy — you don't need to have spent your career in loyalty, but you should have worked with loyalty clients and have a clear sense of what makes programmes succeed or fail

· A track record of leading complex, multi-stakeholder strategy projects from brief to delivery, including direct client involvement at senior level (Account handling and Programme Management will run the project, but the Strategy Director will have significant client exposure and involvement)

· Experience designing or advising on loyalty and/or customer engagement programmes, not just optimising activities, but engaging with the more difficult strategic questions: what should this programme fundamentally be, what behaviour is it trying to change and what does it need to be/become to achieve this?

· Strong relationship with data and insight: you are someone who starts with the evidence, who knows how to interrogate analysis, and who builds arguments on a foundation of proof rather than instinct alone

· Comfort with commercial modelling: you don't need to build the models yourself, but you need to understand them, pressure-test them and know when the numbers are telling the right story

· Experience in transport, financial services, retail or travel is an advantage — though intellectual curiosity and the ability understand a new sector quickly matters more than category expertise Skills and capabilities

· Outstanding written and verbal communication: you write clearly, structure arguments rigorously, and can take a complex brief and turn it into a narrative that moves a room

· Strong facilitation: you can run a workshop with a room full of senior clients, hold the space, and extract genuine strategic insight from the conversation

· A genuine creative instinct - you can make the leap from insight to idea, from problem to proposition. Strategy at its best is inventive, and we expect this person to produce work that is genuinely surprising as well as intellectually sound

· Data literacy and insight-driven thinking: you have an instinct to reach for evidence, strong experience with data as a strategic tool, and the ability to translate analytical output into clear strategic direction

· Intellectual curiosity and range: you read widely, have genuine views on loyalty, and are interested in the psychology, economics and behavioural science that underpin how programmes actually work

· A bias for clarity over complexity: the best strategy work makes the difficult simple, not the simple complicated

· Commercial instinct — you understand that loyalty is ultimately there to solve business problems About you

· You are a self-starter who can create excellent work in a consultancy environment – it is a relatively autonomous environment, you are happy to work independently

· You are collaborative without being passive: you have a point of view, you will argue for it, but you bring people with you

· You are comfortable in a fast-paced environment

· You are curious and not afraid to challenge the fundamentals, but in a way that ensures clients feel supported and understood

· You are using AI tools in a supportive and intelligent way – the work remains indelibly yours but with the aid of tools that provide depth, challenge and insight

· You take quality seriously - the work that goes to clients reflects what Collinson is capable of, and you feel that responsibility

Why Join Us

This is an opportunity to work on some of the organisation’s most strategic and visible client programmes, partnering with globally recognised brands and major transport and travel organisations. The role offers the opportunity to combine strategic client leadership with programme delivery in a fast-paced and collaborative environment.

Col

linson is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes differences in all their forms including: colour, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, family status, age, individuals with disabilities and people from all backgrounds, cultures and experiences as we strongly believe this contributes to our on-going success.

We are focused on continually evolving our purpose driven, high performing culture, providing an environment where our people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and do interesting and meaningful work. Our company values are: Take Action, Do the right thing, One team and Be insight led. These help guide everything we do internally in terms of how we think, act and interact, right through to how we deliver value to our customers and clients.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example - she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, etc).

If you need any extra support throughout the interview process, then please email us at [email protected]