Most Important Skills for a Brand Strategy Consultant at JessKimia Consulting

The skills that are important in marketing, communication, or branding are very similar. Top on that list is strong written and verbal communication. This means being able to find the right words to articulate your message to the right audience, including internal audiences, clients, or your in-house team.

Social skills are also crucial. You need to be able to read the room and adjust your messaging based on who you're speaking to and their perspective. Empathetic listening is a huge skill that's important.

This means not just hearing what people are saying, but trying to put yourself in their position and understand their pain points. So much of what I do is figuring out the problem a brand, business, or product is solving and how to tap into that pain point of a target demographic, speaking about how we are the solution. Design thinking and empathetic listening really allow for that to come out.

Creativity is another important skill. I do a lot of writing, which is informed by how to bring a story to life. Strategic and analytical skills are also essential. Even though I'm not the finance person for my clients, I need to know enough to ask the right questions.

When clients are hiring vendors for marketing or paid social ads, I need to understand the marketing landscape. The platforms that exist now constantly change and didn't even exist when I was in PR. If someone is advertising on TikTok or using Meta ads, I need to be able to ask questions from a brand and business perspective to see where the ROI is, even though that's not my area of expertise.

So, those are probably the most important skills for anything in the marketing or communication world.