What brand managers do and what interviews assess
Brand managers own the positioning, identity, and commercial performance of a brand or portfolio of products. They work across agencies, internal creative teams, sales, and supply chain to ensure the brand delivers commercial results. Interviews assess: understanding of brand strategy and positioning, ability to interpret consumer research and translate it into actionable insight, commercial acumen (connecting brand activity to revenue and margin), project management (managing campaigns and agencies), and creativity balanced with analytical rigour.
Brand strategy questions
"How would you define our brand's positioning to someone who had never heard of it?" This tests whether you have done your research and can articulate positioning clearly. Before your interview, read the brand's website, recent campaigns, and any press coverage. A positioning statement structure: "[Brand] is the [category] for [target consumer] who wants [key benefit], unlike [competitor] which [how it differs]." Be specific and opinionated rather than describing the brand in its own marketing language.
"Tell me about a brand you admire and what you could apply from their strategy to our brand." Choose a brand you can speak about deeply. Explain specifically what makes their strategy effective (not just "they have strong brand identity"), how they have maintained relevance over time, and one specific transferable insight for the brand you are interviewing with. Showing you can apply external thinking to the specific brand is the point of the question.
Campaign and project questions
"Walk me through a campaign you managed end to end." Structure: the commercial objective the campaign was designed to address, the consumer insight that drove the creative approach, how you briefed the agency and what the creative concept was, how you managed the production and media plan, and what the results were against the original objective. Include what you would do differently. Interviewers want to see that you can both lead a campaign and evaluate it honestly.
Analytics and commercial questions
Brand manager interviews at FMCG companies (Unilever, P&G, Mars, Nestle) are particularly quantitative. Expect questions on: market share and volume data interpretation (Nielsen, Kantar), price elasticity, promotional ROI, and brand tracking metrics (awareness, consideration, purchase intent). Be ready to interpret a table of market share data or explain why volume grew while value declined. Analytical rigour is a core expectation even in a creative-leaning role.