Brand Strategy Director
Thomas O'Connell
20+ years building brand strategy for Nike, LEGO, Google, PlayStation, PUMA, and Adidas across 70+ global markets. Known for cultural sharpness and commercial rigor in equal measure — working equally well in C-suites selling through at the highest level and in a coffee shop equipping a brand for success in a day. From leading brand innovation for Fortune 10 companies to managing 15+ startup brands from napkin sketch to raise and beyond. Grew up across five countries, educated in Scotland, fluent in four languages. Proven to lead brands as a sole practitioner, managing teams of 15+ people, and a combo thereof.
Boston, MA·Dual Citizen USA/UK·617.312.9425
What else
A few things I keep coming back to.
Ask a butcher, they'll sell you steak.
Specialization is valuable. Tunnel vision is not. When media, brand, and creative don't operate in lockstep, you're not building an engine — you're buying expensive parts and hoping they fit. Cross-functional fluency isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole game.
A brand in a silo is just a very expensive echo chamber.
Great creative living in a vacuum doesn't drive growth. It burns budget and flatters itself. Real brand leadership means understanding the full business — product, operations, the P&L. If your brand strategy isn't directly tethered to commercial reality, it's not strategy. It's arts and crafts.
Stop pushing. Start pulling.
Pushing a brand into the world and hoping it leads the category is an outdated playbook. Expensive, too. The brands that win bring culture in — they don't just reflect the world, they inform it. That's the difference between chasing relevance and owning a category.
Everything communicates. Everything.
A brand is not a logo. It's not a campaign or a website. It lives in every touchpoint — the product, the people, the customer service workflow, the way your CEO walks into a room. If you aren't intentionally designing all of it, you don't have a brand. You have a vibe, and vibes drift.
CV
Experience
Cross-Functional Leadership · Global Brand Strategy · Brand Architecture · Narrative & Positioning · Cultural & Consumer Insights · Influencer & Lifestyle Strategy · KPI Frameworks · New Business Development · Purpose & Impact
LEGO
2022–2025
Boston, MA
Brand Strategy Director
Global brand strategy across a matrixed, product-led organization spanning media, retail, and content.
- —Self-initiated brand expansion that identified $150M in untapped market headroom — and directed its capture.
- —Unified narrative across media, retail, and content by aligning creative, analytics, and business unit leads at scale.
- —Managed multi-year brand plans balancing creative investment with KPI frameworks tied to brand equity and commercial outcomes.
- —Developed channel strategy across TikTok, Reddit, and AI-driven media — expanding reach into emerging platforms while maintaining brand safety.
We Make Heart
2013–2025
Boston, MA
Founder & Strategy Director
Brand consultancy serving 25+ global clients across lifestyle, consumer products, SaaS, and enterprise technology.
- —Repositioned Keurig Commercial beyond a single business unit — expanding across the full Dr. Pepper portfolio, growing revenue headroom per employee from $50 to $250 annually by shifting the brand from coffee to total workplace refreshment.
- —Broke Google into the C-suite by replacing decks and email with high-touch physical artifacts — reframing Google's value beyond search; adopted as the standard for senior executive engagement.
- —Unified SolidWorks — a fragmented $4B CAD portfolio — under "Build the Future, Faster": one platform structuring sub-brands, CEO keynotes, advertising, and social campaigns that outperformed historical benchmarks by 3x.
- —Redefined PUMA's retail presence from passive display to high-engagement experience — anchoring the brand's highest-impact campaign launches through partnerships with The Weeknd, the Kardashians, and FUBU.
- —Built operational brand systems for Infinity Automotive, Jackson Hewitt, Quickbase, and Timberland — frameworks that outlasted the engagement and continued driving consistency and commercial performance.
Hill Holliday
2011–2013
Boston, MA
SVP, Group Strategy Director
Youngest-serving SVP in agency history, promoted within six months. Rebuilt lifestyle, sports, and media practice.
- —Operated as connective thread between siloed departments — organically growing the agency's bottom line by selling media business into creative clients and creative business to media clients.
- —Drove five consecutive new business wins, reintroducing lifestyle and sports clients to the agency's portfolio for the first time in decades.
- —Led integrated strategy for PUMA, VH1, Liberty Mutual, and Dunkin' across campaigns, media, and cross-functional teams.
Further Experience
2003–2012
London · New York · Boston · Geneva
- —Modernista! — Strategy Director: Brand strategy for Nickelodeon, Showtime, and MTV.
- —Havas — Creative Strategy Director: Creative strategy for Nestlé, Jaguar, and Dos Equis.
- —Publicis BBH — Communications Strategy Director: Media and Channel strategy for Ally Bank launch.
- —Proton Communications — Senior Creative Strategist: Integrated brand strategies for Nike, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and Coca-Cola.
- —WPP — Media Planner: Global media strategy for Nike and PlayStation — award-winning, world-first campaigns across international markets.
- —United Nations — Economist: Strategic workforce analysis across 15+ countries — analytical grounding that underpins a metrics-driven approach to brand strategy.
Education
University of St Andrews
Scotland
- MBA, Economics & International Relations
- MA, Modern History & International Relations