Senior Manager, Connections & Comms

Senior Manager Connections & Comms

Posted Date:

Sep 30, 2026

Requisition Number:

130552

Why Hershey:

At The Hershey Company, our culture is rooted in purpose and inspired by Milton Hershey’s enduring vision that business should create opportunity for others. Through our commitment to corporate philanthropy, we create positive impact by supporting communities, helping children thrive, and operating as a business for good. This includes our deep and long standing partnership with Milton Hershey School, where we invest in education, workforce readiness, and hands on engagement to help students succeed beyond the classroom. Supported by strategic grantmaking, product donations, cross brand collaboration, and strong employee volunteerism, Hershey offers a place to work where making a difference—locally and globally—is part of how we do business every day.

About The Hershey Company

The Hershey Company (NYSE: HSY) is an industry-leading snacks company known for making more moments of goodness through its iconic brands. With a strong portfolio across chocolate, confectionery, and salty snacks, Hershey delights consumers every day. Our beloved brands include Hershey’s, Reese’s, KitKat®, Dots Pretzels, Lesser Evil, Jolly Rancher, Twizzlers, Ice Breakers, and more.

At Hershey, we are committed to making a meaningful difference in the communities where we live, work, and do business. This commitment originated with our founder, Milton Hershey, and continues to shape who we are today.

Guided by our employee value proposition, Lead Today. Create Tomorrow, we empower our people to drive impact now while shaping what comes next. Our One Hershey mindset brings teams together across functions, geographies, and businesses, enabling us to operate with speed, collaboration, and shared purpose.

The Hershey Company is proud to be recognized as a top employer in the United States, reflecting our commitment to our people, culture, and purpose.

Location

New York, NY / Hybrid in office

How will you fit into the big picture?

The Senior Manager, Connections Strategist — Growth & Insurgent Brands is responsible for building modern, consumer-first connection strategies for brands with outsized growth potential, including brands that are scaling quickly, entering new consumer spaces, or requiring more agile, culturally fluent go-to-market models. This leader translates brand ambition, consumer insight, business priorities, and marketplace signals into integrated connection plans that drive awareness, trial, relevance, demand capture, and measurable growth.

This role will serve as the strategic connective tissue between Brand, Creative, Media, Commerce, Earned/Shared, Social, Measurement, and agency partners—ensuring growth brands receive the right level of strategic rigor, speed, experimentation, and integration without defaulting to a one-size-fits-all model. The ideal candidate is comfortable operating in ambiguity, building plans from limited data, pushing for sharper briefs, challenging legacy assumptions, and helping brands move from isolated tactics to connected growth ecosystems.

What will you do?

Hershey is transforming Consumer Connections into a modern growth engine that integrates media, creative, commerce, content, social, and measurement. This role will help define and scale a differentiated growth playbook for insurgent and emerging brands, balancing strategic rigor with speed, experimentation, cultural relevance, and measurable business impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Connections Strategy & Integrated Planning

• • Develop integrated connections strategies aligned to business objectives.
• • Create consumer-first ecosystem plans across paid, owned, earned, retail, commerce, creator, and cultural channels.
• • Define the role of each touchpoint across the consumer journey.
• • Partner with brand teams and agencies to ensure clear strategic direction and effective execution.
• • Lead integrated go-to-market plans for launches, innovation, seasonal moments, and growth initiatives.

• Growth & Insurgent Brand Leadership

• Build and evolve a scalable Connections playbook for high-growth brands.

• Prioritize audiences, channels, and investments for brands with limited budgets or historical data.

• Identify alternative approaches across agencies, creators, social content, community building, and commerce activation.

• Connect fragmented tactics into cohesive growth ecosystems.

• Evaluate investment strategies and ensure alignment to growth objectives.

• Audience, Culture & Content Strategy

• Leverage consumer, cultural, social, and commerce insights to identify growth opportunities.

• Partner across creative, social, and agency teams to develop culturally relevant, platform-native ideas.

• Use performance data to optimize, scale, or discontinue content and initiatives.

• Build connected content systems that create consistent brand experiences across channels.

• Help brands establish distinctive voices, partnerships, and cultural relevance.

• Media, Commerce & Investment Strategy

• Partner with media, commerce, finance, measurement, and agency teams to develop investment recommendations.

• Ensure national media, retail media, social, creator, search, and commerce efforts work as an integrated system.

• Balance investments across awareness, trial, penetration, sales, and market share objectives.

• Recommend where to invest, test, scale, or stop based on performance and business outcomes.

• Agency & Cross-Functional Leadership

• Serve as the strategic lead across integrated agency partners.

• Build strong partnerships across Brand, Creative, Commerce, Sales, Measurement, Social, and agency teams.

• Bring clarity and structure to complex planning decisions.

• Recommend the right operating model for each brand, leveraging internal and external capabilities as needed.

• Maintain high standards of strategic thinking, execution, accountability, and business impact.

• Success Profile

• Strategic and decisive problem solver.

• Deep understanding of modern consumer behavior and marketing ecosystems.

• Strong collaborator and in