Brand manager

🌎 Location:

Budapest, Hungary (hybrid) — with regular travel across our markets

⏰ Schedule:

Monday to Friday 08:30 - 17:30

💰 What we offer:

• Salary up to 2200000 euros gross (fixed salary + bonuses);
• Direct ownership of a brand across five countries, with genuine decision-making scope rather than an execution-only remit;
• A seat in an active expansion story with a clear, ambitious growth target;
• Direct reporting line to the CMO and visibility with the executive team;
• Competitive salary and performance bonus;
• Employee discount on vehicles from our Autozentrum used car stock;
• Hybrid working from our Budapest office.

📋 Responsibilities:

• Brand strategy and architecture
• Define and maintain the positioning for Klass Wagen and the relationship between the group brand, RedyLease and Autozentrum — what each stands for, where they reinforce each other, and where they should stay apart;
• Translate group positioning into local expression across all five markets, so each feels locally credible without fragmenting into five different brands;
• Build the brand entry playbook for new markets: what we say first, what proof we lead with, and what has to be localised versus what never changes.
• Direct-to-customer
• Own the brand side of the direct booking agenda: what makes someone choose to come to us rather than through an intermediary, and how we say it;
• Work with product and revenue management on the direct proposition itself — the reasons to book direct have to be real before they are marketable;
• Build brand-led demand in markets where we are currently visible mainly through third-party channels.
• Brand health measurement
• Own our brand tracking programme end to end — including our search-interest-based tracking infrastructure — and turn it into a small set of metrics leadership actually uses;
• Establish seasonality-adjusted baselines so brand movement can be separated from demand movement in a business with severe seasonal swings;
• Connect brand metrics to commercial outcomes, with direct booking share as the primary link between brand investment and P&L.
• Creative and campaigns
• Own the brand identity system — visual, verbal, tonal — and the guidelines, assets, and templates that let five markets execute without a bottleneck;
• Lead brand campaign development from brief to launch, including the off-season demand challenge that shapes much of our calendar;
• Hold the quality bar on everything that carries the brand, wherever in the group it is produced.
• Partners and stakeholders
• Manage creative, media, and production agencies: briefs, budgets, quality bar, and the decision on what stays in-house;
• Work with local marketing leads, revenue management, product, and operations to keep the promise and the delivery aligned;
• Run competitive and category monitoring, and bring a point of view rather than a summary.

💼 Requirements:

• 3–4 years in brand management, brand strategy or integrated marketing, ideally with multi-market responsibility;
• Demonstrated ownership of a brand across more than one country, with real examples of resolving the global-consistency versus local-relevance tension;
• Comfort with data: you can read a tracking study, question a methodology, and tell the difference between a signal and a seasonal artefact;
• Strong creative judgement and the ability to brief and challenge agencies without doing their job for them;
• Excellent written and spoken English.

Strongly preferred

• Experience in travel, mobility, automotive, marketplace or another category with heavy intermediated distribution;
• Track record of shifting mix toward direct channels;
• Fluency in a second European language relevant to our markets;
• Interest in eventually leading a brand launch in a new market — you don't need to have done this already.

How you work

You are opinionated but evidence-led, and you change your mind when the data says so.

You are comfortable being the only person in the room arguing for the long-term asset when the short-term number is under pressure.

You operate well without a large team beneath you — this is a builder's role before it is a manager's role.

🏢 Why Klass Wagen?

Klass Wagen Group is a European car rental and mobility operator running around 7,000 vehicles across five markets in Central Europe and Iberia, with roughly 400 people behind it.

We are not only a rental company. The group spans core car rental, RedyLease (vehicle subscription), and Autozentrum (used vehicle trading, active in Germany and Portugal). Each serves a different customer, a different buying moment, and a different competitive set — but they all draw on the same fleet, the same operational backbone, and the same reputation.

We are in an expansion phase. New markets are on the table, and the brand needs to travel well when we enter them.