Restaurant Marketing Manager

About Wasabi

Founded in 2003, Wasabi's vision is to lovingly create and serve delicious Asian food for a busy nation.
Wasabi now has 42 thriving restaurants across London, major UK cities and 4 in New York, and has expanded into the grocery channel with launches in Sainsbury's, Tesco, Co op and Morrisons. The grocery business has grown into a £62m RSV brand and is the No. 2 chilled ready meal brand in the market.

Our menu is celebrated for its unique character, exceptional freshness and bold flavours, and our ambitious 5 year growth strategy focuses on new restaurants, franchise partnerships and international expansion.

The Role

The Restaurant Marketing Manager is a senior delivery leader within the Wasabi marketing team. The role translates the agreed restaurant marketing strategy into high impact campaigns, channel plans and customer initiatives, owning day to day delivery from integrated campaign management and social channel execution to go to market planning. The position requires a blend of strategic insight and execution excellence, thriving in a fast paced, lean team where initiative and commercial instinct are valued.

Key Responsibilities Campaign Planning & Delivery

• Translate the agreed restaurant marketing strategy into integrated annual and campaign level marketing plans, ensuring alignment to business priorities.
• Lead development and execution of 360 marketing campaigns from brief through to evaluation; manage timelines, budgets, agency relationships and cross functional sign off.
• Own the Restaurant Marketing Calendar, ensuring all activity is sequenced effectively against commercial priorities and key trading occasions.
• Embed a robust post activity analysis process, ensuring learnings are captured and fed back into future planning.

Creative Executive & Agency Management

• Brief, develop and deliver campaigns within the established creative platform and brand guidelines, ensuring consistency across all customer touchpoints.
• Champion bold, distinctive creative thinking within the agreed brand framework, pushing agency partners to deliver work that cuts through.
• Manage day to day relationships with creative, media and production agencies, setting briefs, managing feedback cycles and maintaining high output standards.

Digital & Social Media

• Own the day to day management and growth of Wasabi's restaurant social media channels (Instagram, TikTok and others), executing against the social strategy set by the Marketing Director.
• Manage CRM and loyalty marketing, owning customer lifecycle communications through the Wasabi app and owned channels to drive frequency and retention.
• Plan and manage performance marketing activity (paid social, paid search) in support of campaign and commercial objectives.
• Drive delivery channel marketing on aggregator platforms (Uber Eats, Deliveroo and others), managing promotional activity, brand visibility and platform performance.
• Lead go to market planning and execution for new product launches, working closely with the Food team to ensure strong commercial and creative cut through.
• Contribute customer insight and campaign learnings to the NPD/EPD pipeline process, acting as the voice of the customer in food development conversations.

Local Store Marketing

• Develop and manage the LSM toolkit, translating the central LSM strategy into practical, impactful materials and resources that empower restaurant teams to market locally.
• Work with Area Managers to build operational understanding of marketing led sales drivers and ensure local execution is consistent with brand standards.

Insight, Performance & Reporting

• Champion a customer first approach using data, research and behavioural insight to sharpen campaign decisions and channel plans.
• Own campaign performance tracking, reporting against agreed KPIs and using data to continuously optimise activity in flight and post campaign.
• Work closely with the Customer Insights Manager to surface growth opportunities and bring insight to bear on briefs and strategy.

Stakeholder & Cross Functional Collaboration

• Build strong working relationships across Operations, Finance, Food and Grocery Marketing, ensuring alignment and shared ownership of the marketing plan.
• Collaborate with the Grocery Marketing team at relevant touchpoints to maintain a coherent omnichannel brand experience.
• Represent marketing effectively in cross functional forums, communicating plans, results and priorities clearly to non marketing stakeholders.

Budget Management

• Manage the day to day restaurant marketing budget with commercial discipline, tracking spend against plan and ensuring strong ROI.
• Provide timely financial reporting to the Marketing Director, flagging risks and opportunities as they arise.

Requirements

• Proven experience in a senior marketing role within QSR, multi site hospitality or retail.
• Strong campaign management capability, able to take a brief from insight through to execution and rigorous post campaign evaluation.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver against commercial KPIs including revenue, transactions and ROI.
• Strong agency management skills, able to write effective briefs, manage creative development and hold partners to high standards.
• Commercially astute, with experience managing and optimising marketing budgets.
• Hands on digital and social expertise, managing social channels, performance marketing and CRM/loyalty programmes.
• Genuinely social media fluent with experience in influencer and creator marketing, and a clear understanding of how to build brand reach through authentic, user generated content.
• Highly collaborative and able to work effectively across Operations, Finance, Food and other functions without losing momentum.
• Excellent organisational skills; able to manage multiple priorities and deliver at pace without compromising quality.
• Comfortable in a fast moving, lean resource environment; resourceful, resilient and solutions focused.
• A genuine passion for food, hospitality and building brands that people love.

Benefits

• A great working environment
• Pension scheme
• Target bonus
• Refer a friend scheme
• Free sushi or hot food (vegan options available)
• 50% discount in our branches
• Employee assistant programme
• Hybrid working model
• Long service awards
• Wagestream - a financial wellbeing benefit that lets you access your pay as you earn it in real time and manage savings
• Life assurance
• Electric vehicle scheme through Octopus
• Cycle to work
• Free on site parking
• A variety of discounts (shopping, food & drink, entertainment and health & fitness) through Perkbox
• The opportunity to develop your skills within a growing company.