Data Strategy Director

Location: London · Hybrid

Job Description

About Collinson

Collinson is the global leader in travel experiences and customer engagement, a business that builds loyalty 500 million times a day, across 140 countries, for some of the world’s most ambitious brands. Our clients include major financial institutions, airlines, transport operators and retailers who trust us to design programmes that move customers from passive participation to genuine, measurable commitment.

Our loyalty practice sits at the intersection of behavioural strategy, data science and programme design. We believe the best loyalty programmes are strategic assets, not cost centres - and that the commercial case for a programme lives or dies on the quality of the data thinking behind it. We are evidence-led in everything we do: the incremental journey assumption, the partner revenue model, the rewards strategy, the measurement framework. All of it is built on data.

The Role

This is a senior data strategy hire into our consulting business, and a new capability for the practice. You will sit alongside the Strategy Director as a peer — the two roles are designed to work in close partnership, with strategy and data working as a single discipline rather than separate functions. Where the Strategy Director owns the loyalty proposition and commercial narrative, you own the data foundation it is built on, the analytical insight that sharpens it over time, and the evidence that proves it is working.

This is not a technical data role. We are not looking for an engineer, an analyst or a data scientist. We are looking for someone who understands what data can reveal about customer behaviour, what it means for a loyalty programme’s commercial performance, and how to turn that into recommendations that clients will act on. The ability to interrogate a client’s database and surface something genuinely surprising - a segment no one had noticed, a rewards pattern that is suppressing engagement, a trend that changes the programme’s direction - is as important as the ability to model a commercial scenario.

You will work directly with clients at a senior level. You will present findings, lead working sessions, and be a trusted voice on what the data is saying and what to do about it. The relationship dimension matters: clients on these accounts are sophisticated, commercially fluent and will push back hard on anything that does not hold up. You need to be someone who welcomes that.

What You’ll Do

Commercial modelling

• Build and own commercial models for new and existing loyalty propositions - registration and engagement scenarios, incremental journey assumptions, partner revenue sizing, cost modelling and sensitivity analysis

• Pressure-test commercial assumptions with data: where are the numbers relying on optimism rather than evidence, and what does the floor case actually look like

• Develop and maintain incrementality measurement frameworks - control group design, attribution methodology, baseline construction - that make the commercial case defensible to a finance director or a board

• Work with the Strategy Director to ensure that every commercial argument we make is grounded in a data foundation that can survive scrutiny

Client data exploration and insight

• Conduct rich exploratory analysis of clients’ existing data: transaction databases, engagement records, CRM data, travel behaviour patterns to surface trends, anomalies and opportunities that clients have not seen or have not known how to act on

• Translate analytical findings into clear, commercially useful insight: not data for its own sake, but data that changes what a client decides to do next

• Produce insight outputs - reports, presentations, working papers - that are genuinely readable by a non-technical senior audience and that arrive with a clear recommendation attached

• Identify segments, behavioural clusters and customer patterns that inform proposition design, reward strategy and communication targeting

Client relationships and programme improvement

• Build and maintain direct relationships with client data, insight and commercial teams - you are a trusted partner on the data dimension of the account

• Lead ongoing programme performance reviews with clients: what is the data saying about what is working, what is not, and what needs to change

• Proactively identify and surface improvement opportunities - not waiting to be asked, but bringing a regular cadence of data-driven recommendations that keep the programme moving forward

• Act as the client’s thinking partner when they are facing a data question: whether to invest in a new segment, how to respond to a drop in engagement, whether a rewards mechanic is delivering the behaviour change it was designed for

Rewards strategy

• Work closely with the rewards team to ensure that rewards design and selection is led by data rather than intuition: which categories are resonating, which are not, and what the engagement and redemption patterns are telling us

• Analyse reward performance at a segment level: the right reward for a cash-strapped younger Londoner is not the right reward for an affluent business traveller, and the data should prove that

• Identify gaps and opportunities in the rewards architecture: where is the programme leaving value on the table, and what would a data-led adjustment look like

External partnerships and data-driven products

• Work with external partners - media agencies, data platforms, technology providers, research firms - to help shape data-driven products and services that add value to clients

• Identify where external data sources or partnerships could enrich a client’s programme: third-party behavioural data, market intelligence, panel research and help make the case for integrating them

• Support the development of Collinson’s own data-driven IP and methodologies: the frameworks, benchmarks and diagnostic tools that make our commercial modelling and insight offer distinctive

Practice development

• Help build the data strategy capability within the consulting practice - developing approaches, tools and methods that can be applied across accounts rather than rebuilt from scratch each time

• Contribute to new business pitches where data strategy is a material part of the value proposition: shaping the analytical approach, sizing the opportunity and presenting with conviction

• Collaborate with the Strategy Director to ensure data and strategy are always working as a single discipline, not separate lanes

What You’ll Bring

Experience

• Experience in loyalty analytics, CRM strategy, or customer insight consulting — you should have spent meaningful time working with loyalty or engagement programme data, and have a clear sense of what it reveals about customer behaviour and commercial performance

• A track record of building commercial models for loyalty or customer engagement programmes — you understand how registration, engagement and behaviour change assumptions translate into a business case, and how to test whether those assumptions are credible

• Direct client experience at a senior level: you have presented analytical findings and commercial recommendations to clients who push back, and you are better for it

• Experience conducting exploratory analysis of large customer databases and surfacing insight that is genuinely useful, not just descriptive, but directional

• Familiarity with rewards and CRM programme mechanics: you understand how engagement, redemption and lifecycle patterns work, and you know what the data is usually hiding

• Experience working with external data partners, agencies or platforms is an advantage; what matters more is that you understand where external data adds value and where it is noise

Skills and capabilities

• Strong analytical capability: you are comfortable in the data, you know how to interrogate it properly, and you do not accept a number just because it is in a spreadsheet

• Outstanding written and verbal communication: you can take a complex analysis and turn it into a recommendation that moves a room — the rigour of the thinking should be visible in the clarity of the output

• Commercial fluency: you understand that analytical work in this context exists to solve business problems and improve commercial performance, not to demonstrate methodological sophistication

• Strong client presence: you are credible, direct and comfortable in senior client environments — you bring a point of view and you can defend it

• Collaborative instinct: you work well alongside a strategy partner, you know when to lead and when to support, and you do not treat data as a separate discipline from the commercial and strategic work

• A bias for clarity: the best data work makes complex things legible. You write and present with precision and you resist the temptation to show your working when a conclusion will do

About You

• You are a self-starter who produces excellent work with a high degree of autonomy — you do not need to be told what the interesting question is, you find it yourself

• You are genuinely curious about customer behaviour: what drives it, what changes it, and what the data reveals that common sense misses

• You are collaborative without being passive: you have strong views on what the data is saying and you will argue for them, but you bring people with you

• You are using AI tools intelligently — to move faster, to interrogate data more thoroughly, to pressure-test assumptions. The thinking remains yours

• You take quality seriously: the analysis and the commercial models that go to clients on these accounts reflect what Collinson is capable of, and you feel that responsibility

Reward & Benefits: What's in it for me?

We want our people to feel recognised, supported and able to thrive both at work and beyond it.

We offer a competitive reward package designed to support your financial, physical and mental wellbeing, alongside opportunities to learn, develop and be recognised for the contribution you make. Benefits vary by role and location, and full details will be shared as part of the application process.

Equal opportunities: Our commitment to inclusion

Collinson Group is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and experiences, and believe that different perspectives make our business stronger.