Interim Creative Director

Kao is passionate about making a difference in people's lives with high quality products and services to create a Kirei Life for all, respecting consumers, customers and the planet. The Kao Way guides integrity, innovation and trust within our corporate values.

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 to deliver engaging, relevant campaigns that resonate with our audience. You'll shape 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, translate brand USP into a unique brand territory with ownable talking points & content strategy, and a tone of voice driven by the brand to show up in conversations, communities and culture, in a way that matters to the target consumers. Drive character, relevance and distinctiveness vs competitive set to build engagement and increased consideration.
• Issue global brand guidelines (Logo, POS, Print, Tone of voice, Content talking points) to enable brand custodianship and governance globally, across offline and online, in omnichannel markets.
• Lead campaigns with a social-by-design mindset to answer briefs, delivering meaningful ideas across the customer funnel to drive awareness, relevant conversations and engagement with communities across social channels; driving visibility and interest across retail, wholesale and digital estates, as well as relevance at conversion.
• Ensure a distinctive, true-to-brand and holistic look & feel in line with the new brand world.
• Willing to challenge the status quo and experiment with formats, production value and new technology to publish more relevant content in a scalable and cost-effective way, maximizing engagement and budget accountability.
• Ability to test & learn on various social and digital channels, evaluating content theme, production value, source (owned vs creator), and budget allocation against pre-agreed metrics driving engagement.
• Engage with pioneering technologies to assist creativity, cost-efficiency & scalability by amplifying possibilities across visuals and copy (generative AI) and workflows.
• Effectively manages a team across design and operations, developing internal creative talent and opening up new possibilities to think creatively or produce content.
• Look to improve ways of working and processes to optimize resource and budget allocation, driving an innovation mindset across the end-to-end creative process.
• Maintain gravitas and assertiveness to manage stakeholders through the creative process, safeguarding brand needs while ensuring creative assets support community-building strategy and commercial needs across platforms.

What you will need:

• Marketing degree or equivalent
• 10 years experience in a creative agency or in-house studio with proven leadership of a creative & operations team delivering brand-building, social-by-design, 360 campaigns and content across concept, design, tone of voice and production
• Master of creative excellence in digital, particularly social and retail channels
• Proven creative thinking and execution showing social-by-design intentionality to drive engagement to purchase across multi-channels
• Experience relaunching/repositioning a brand for targeted communities
• Strategic thinking behind proposed content strategy
• Proven agility to innovate and generate cost-efficient, channel-relevant content, exploring alternative production options or creator partnerships
• Strong experience owning, challenging and innovating traditional content production while managing budgets
• Evidenced ability to lead and manage teams
• Proven interpersonal effectiveness to navigate stakeholder discussions and balance commercial realities with brand and creative needs

Hiring process and about Kao

Kao embraces diversity and individual personalities, believing it strengthens the company. This is why we welcome applications from all areas of the global community.

Want to learn more? If you feel you are unique as our products and want to discover why 33,000 people across the globe chose Kao, please visit