Associate Director, Brand, Culture & Activations

About the Role

Department: Brand, Strategy, & Communication

Reports To: VP of Brand Marketing

Location: Watertown, MA (ButcherBox Headquarters)

Level: Associate Director

Base Salary: $135,000.00 - $170,000.00

Role Summary

ButcherBox is entering a new chapter.

We have a strong business, a powerful mission, and a product people genuinely care about. Now we are building the brand muscle to match.

The opportunity ahead is not just to make ButcherBox bigger. It is to make us sharper, more distinctive, more culturally relevant, and more felt in the world. To move from a business people love to a brand people recognize, talk about, and feel something about.

This role is foundational to making that happen.

The Associate Director, Brand Culture & Activations will help shape how ButcherBox shows up in culture, in communities, in partnerships, in real life, and in the moments people actually notice.

We are looking for a big thinker with strong taste, sharp instincts, and the ability to turn a brand platform into ideas people can see, feel, share, and talk about. Someone who is deeply plugged into culture, but not chasing trends. Someone who knows how to spot the opening, sharpen the idea, and make it feel unmistakably like us.

This person will own the brand’s cultural programming calendar, but this is not a calendar-management role. It is about creating the ideas that fill it. The partnerships, activations, brand moments, member experiences, founder-led ideas, surprise-and-delight programs, cultural plays, and real-world expressions that help ButcherBox show up with more point of view and more energy.

This is a role for someone who can think like a strategist, concept like a creative, and build like an operator.

Someone who can help make ButcherBox feel less expected, more alive, and much harder to ignore.

What They Own

• Cultural Programming & Brand Moments

• Concept and build the brand moments, activations, partnerships, cultural ideas, and real-world experiences that help ButcherBox show up with more relevance, distinction, and point of view.

• Own the brand’s cultural programming calendar as a strategic tool for building awareness, affinity, conversation, and brand meaning.

• Translate business and brand priorities into consumer-facing ideas that feel timely, ownable, useful, and worth talking about.

• Bring forward ideas that connect ButcherBox to culture in ways that feel natural, not forced. Sharp, not gimmicky. Distinct, not generic.

• Identify where ButcherBox has permission to show up and where we can create new permission through creativity, usefulness, and conviction.

• Partner closely with creative, social, PR, growth, retail, product, member experience, and CX to make sure brand moments connect across the business and do not live as one-off ideas.

Brand Activations & Experiences

• Lead the concepting and execution of brand activations, pop-ups, events, IRL experiences, community moments, and surprise-and-delight programs.

• Shape the full experience from the core idea to the details people remember.

• Bring a high-taste lens to everything: the concept, the environment, the language, the partner, the takeaway, the guest experience, and the follow-through.

• Know how to make small ideas feel big, and big ideas feel simple enough to actually execute.

• Manage the moving pieces needed to bring activations to life, including timelines, budgets, vendors, production partners, and cross-functional teams.

• Build moments that feel unmistakably ButcherBox, not like something any food brand could have done.

Partnerships & Cultural Opportunities

• Concept and develop partnerships, collaborations, creator moments, talent ideas, founder-led opportunities, and community-driven programs that extend ButcherBox into culture.

• Evaluate opportunities through the lens of brand fit, audience relevance, cultural heat, business value, and whether the idea has a real reason to exist.

• Spot unexpected ways for ButcherBox to show up, then turn those opportunities into ideas that feel simple, sharp, and ownable.

• Partner with social, PR, and creative to make every partnership work harder across channels.

• Bring a strong point of view on who we should align with, what we should make together, and how the collaboration should live in the world.

Brand Platform in Action

• Help translate the brand platform into real-world behaviors, ideas, partnerships, activations, member moments, and company-wide initiatives.

• Act as a filter for what feels like ButcherBox and what does not.

• Help teams understand how the brand should show up beyond campaigns: in culture, in member experience, in retail, in partnerships, in service moments, and in the details people remember.

• Push the brand to show up with more conviction, more specificity, and more personality.

• Make sure the brand does not just live in a deck. It shows up in the work.

Systems That Support the Work

• Build the lightweight tools and rhythms that help the brand team move with clarity, creativity, and momentum.

• Create briefs, timelines, recaps, planning documents, and cross-functional workflows that help great ideas move from conversation to execution.

• Track learnings from activations, partnerships, and cultural moments so the team gets sharper over time.

• Bring structure without stripping the work of its energy.

• Help create the operating system for a brand team that moves quickly, thinks creatively, and knows what good looks like.

Who They Are

• A culturally attuned brand thinker with strong creative instincts and a real point of view.

• A big-idea person who can also take idea all the way through to execution.

• Someone who does not just execute ideas. They concept them, shape them, sharpen them, and bring them to life.

• A strategic doer who can spot a strong idea, make it better, and understand what it takes to move it through an organization.

• Someone with strong taste and a clear instinct for what makes a brand feel relevant, human, useful, and memorable.

• Curious about what people are talking about, sharing, eating, buying, watching, rejecting, and caring about.

• Comfortable moving between cultural insight, creative concepts, partnerships, budgets, timelines, vendors, and execution.

• Organized enough to keep the work moving, but not defined by project management.

• Collaborative, low-ego, and able to bring people along without overcomplicating the process.

• Someone who understands that brand is not just campaigns. It is how a company behaves, what it chooses to care about, and how it shows up when people are paying attention.

Ideal Experience

• 7–10 years of experience in brand marketing, cultural marketing, activations, partnerships, experiential, integrated marketing, or related brand-building roles.

• A portfolio of culture-led initiatives, activations, partnerships, campaigns, or experiences that earned attention, conversation, press, social engagement, or internal recognition.

• Experience concepting and building culturally relevant brand moments from idea through execution.

• Strong instincts around consumer behavior, culture, content, creators, partnerships, IRL experiences, and what makes people care.

• Experience bringing campaigns, activations, or partnerships to life across multiple channels.

• Comfort managing vendors, production partners, budgets, timelines, and cross-functional stakeholders.

• Consumer brand experience preferred, especially in food, lifestyle, CPG, retail, hospitality, wellness, or culturally relevant brands.

• Experience working in a brand that had to punch above its weight is a plus.