Creative Associate Director

Founded in Japan in 1887, Kao is passionate about making a difference in people\’s lives with our high quality products and services to create a Kirei Life for all – a beautiful life that respects the needs of our consumers and customers as well as the planet. We never compromise on quality and craft our products with care for the consumer and the environment.

As a company driven by purpose and strong corporate values we pride ourselves to be listed among the World\’s Most Ethical Companies since 19 consecutive years. Our corporate philosophy, the Kao Way, guides us in everything we do – acting with integrity, courageously driving innovation and treating each other with trust and respect.

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The role:

We’re looking for a visionary creative leader who can turn a deep understanding of the evolving media landscape, technology, and consumer behaviour into powerful, unmissable ideas. In this role, you’ll blend brand-led and creator-led content seamlessly to deliver engaging, relevant campaigns that resonate with our audience.

You’ll be responsible for shaping our brand narrative, creative direction, and visual identity across all touchpoints—ensuring our brand stands out meaningfully from the competition. With a strong social-first mindset, you’ll drive cultural impact through distinctive storytelling, digital excellence, and content efficiency at scale. From concept to execution, you’ll lead the creative process end-to-end: tone of voice, campaign design, packaging integration, and more—creating a cohesive brand experience in both physical and digital spaces.

What you will do:

• Responsible to shape an ownable and memorable brand visual identity, tone of voice & content strategy
• Jointly with AD, Brand & Development, challenges and translates brand USP into a unique brand territory, with ownable talking points & content strategy, and a tone a voice driven by the obsession for the brand to show up in conversations, communities and culture, in a way that matter to the target consumers. Driving character, relevance and distinctiveness vs competitive set, to build engagement, cut-through and reappraisal of the brand towards increased consideration.
• Issues global brand guidelines (Logo, POS, Print, Tone of voice, Content talking points…) to enable brand custodianship and governance globally, across off line and on line, in our omnichannel markets.
• A keen social by design mindset, leads team to develop campaigns that matter to our target consumers, in answer to marketing briefs, with a meaningful/unmissable creative idea/execution across the customer funnel to drive awareness, relevant & compelling conversations and unmissable engagement with our communities across social channels; in turn driving visibility and interest across our retail, wholesale and digital estates, as well as relevance at conversion.
• Ensures a distinctive, true to brand and holistic look & feel, in keeping with the new brand world.
• Willing to challenge the status quo and to experiment with formats, production value and new technology to publish more relevant content, in a scalable and cost-effective way, to maximize engagement & budget accountability.
• Ability to test & learn on various social and digital channels, to experiment and challenge choices made, based on pre agreed metrics driving engagement: content theme, content production value, content production source (owned vs creator), budget allocation.
• Knowledgeable and willing to engage with pioneering technologies to assist creativity, cost-efficiency & scalability by amplifying what’s possible across visual and copy (generative AI), as well as ways of working (workflows)
• Effectively manages a team across design and operations. Stimulates and develop internal creative talent, opening up new possibilities to think creatively or to produce content.
• Look to improve ways of working/processes, to optimize the allocation of resource and budget, driving an innovation mindset across the end to end creative process.
• Gravitas and assertiveness to effectively manage stakeholders across the creative process approval, ensuring the brand needs are safeguarded, but also that the creative assets are supporting our community-building strategy but not at the extent of the commercial needs across our various platforms/digital estate.

What you will need:

• Marketing degree or equivalent.
• 10 year experience working in a creative agency or in house creative studio with proven expertise of leading a creative & operations team towards developing brand-building, social-by-design, 360 campaigns and content (concept, design, tone of voice, realization and production) that resonate with target consumers, and make a meaningful impact in the communities, conversations and culture they care about.
• Master of creative excellence in digital (in particular social and retail channels).
• Proven creative thinking and execution demonstrating a social-by-design intentionality (creative ideation & creative execution) to seamlessly drive engagement to purchase across multi channels, across the consumer funnel (both on line and off line).
• Experience successfully relaunching/repositioning a brand to matter for the targeted community.
• Strategic thinking behind proposed content strategy.
• Proven agility to innovate and generate content in a cost efficient and channel-relevant way, via exploration of alternative production options, or the use of creators.
• Demonstrates strong experience of owning, challenging and innovating in traditional ways of producing content, to maintain accountability of one’s budget.
• Evidenced ability to effectively lead and manage teams.
• Proven interpersonal effectiveness, to navigate challenging stakeholders’ discussion/debates across the business, with a view to convince and stand one’s ground, however balancing one’s gravitas & own perspective with the need to adjust to a meaningful competitive, commercial & economic reality.

Molton Brown is part of Kao founded in Japan in 1887, Kao is passionate about making a difference in people\’s lives with our high-quality products and services to create a Kirei Life for all – a beautiful life that respects the needs of our consumers and customers as well as the planet. Our corporate philosophy, the Kao Way, guides us in everything we do – acting with integrity, courageously driving innovation and treating each other with trust and respect.

How we work: Having been selected among the World\’s Most Ethical Companies for 19 consecutive years, we are a company with a purpose and strong corporate values. We never compromise on quality and craft our products with care for the consumer and the environment. At Kao, each employee can actively shape their job and their career. We work collaboratively to achieve our common goals, always aiming to deliver the best for our customers.

Hiring Process: Kao embraces the diversity and the individual personalities of its people because we believe it is diversity that makes us strong. This is why we welcome applications from all areas of the global community.

Want to learn more: If you feel you are as unique as our products and want to find out why 33,000 people across the globe opted for a career with us please visit

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