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 and major UK cities and 4 in New York and in 2019, we introduced Wasabi Home Bento the grocery channel, launching exclusively in Sainsbury’s. Building on that success, the grocery business broadened its reach to Tesco in September 2022, followed by exciting launches in Co-op and Morrisons in 2024. Wasabi grocery has seen phenomenal growth and is now a £62m RSV brand. Wasabi proudly stands as the No. 2 chilled ready-meal brand in the market, consistently attracting new customers to the category through an innovative East Asian range.
Wasabi’s menu is celebrated for its unique character, exceptional freshness, and bold flavours. Our diverse range is designed to delight a wide audience, delivering both comfort and excitement with every bite.
We have an ambitious 5-year growth strategy, focusing on new restaurants, franchise partnerships, and international expansion.
As we prepare for our next phase of growth and innovation, we have an incredibly exciting opportunity for a Restaurant Marketing Manager to join our Marketing Team based in Park Royal.
The Role:
The Restaurant Marketing Manager is a senior delivery leader within the Wasabi marketing team, responsible for translating the agreed restaurant marketing strategy into high-impact campaigns, channel plans, and customer initiatives. This role owns the day-to-day delivery of restaurant marketing activity, from integrated campaign management and social channel execution to go-to-market planning, ensuring all work is insight-led, creatively strong, and delivers against agreed commercial KPIs.
Working closely with the Marketing Director and cross-functional teams, this is a hands-on role that demands both strategic understanding and executional excellence. The right candidate is comfortable moving between a campaign brief and a performance dashboard, and thrives in a fast-paced, lean team environment where initiative and commercial instinct are valued as much as process.
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; managing 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
Go-to-market execution
- 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 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
Our Requirements:
We are looking for a commercially minded, hands-on marketing professional with a proven track record of delivering impactful campaigns and managing digital channels in a QSR, multi-site hospitality, or retail environment. This individual combines strong executional capability with digital fluency and real commercial instinct; comfortable managing multiple workstreams at pace in a lean team where you are as likely to be doing as directing.
- 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
In return we provide:
- 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 Octapus
- Cycle To Work
- Free on-site parking
- A variety of discounts (shopping, food & drink, entertainment and health & fitness) through Perkbox and
- The opportunity to develop your skills within a growing company.
Our people make us who we are. Join a company where you’ll have the opportunity to work for a growing company and build a real career.
COME ROLL WITH US!
