You Have a Decision Problem, Not a Marketing Problem

The question arrives in almost identical form, several times a year.

Do we need someone senior, someone junior, or a mix of the two?

It is a sensible question asked in good faith by people who are trying to be responsible with money. It is also, almost always, unanswerable at the point it is asked, and answering it anyway is how businesses end up with the wrong hire and a stalled year.

Why the question cannot be answered yet

The senior or junior question assumes the work is known and only the seniority is in doubt. In practice the opposite is true. What is uncertain is the work.

Consider what has to be established before the resourcing question becomes answerable. What is actually generating enquiries at the moment, as opposed to what everyone assumes is generating them. Which parts of the marketing function exist, which have been half built, and which have never been attempted. Where the same effort is being duplicated across channels because no one has decided which channel matters. Whether the constraint is capacity, capability, direction, or a decision that nobody has been willing to make.

Until those are established, senior or junior is a question about a job that has not been defined. Any answer given at that point is a guess, and the guess is usually shaped by budget rather than by need.

There is also a second axis the question quietly ignores. Seniority is one dimension, but direction and delivery is another, and it is often the more important of the two. A business can be short of judgement, short of hands, or short of both, and those are not points on a single scale running from junior to senior. Plenty of organisations have thought carefully about where they are going and simply cannot get the work out of the door. Plenty of others have prolific output and no settled view of what it is for. Asking only about seniority collapses both situations into the same question and produces the same answer for two different problems.

An honest consultant’s answer is that they do not know yet, and will not know until they have looked properly. That answer is commercially inconvenient. It is also the only accurate one.

What guessing costs

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation found that 85% of HR decision makers admit their organisation has made a bad hire, and that a third believe those mistakes cost the business nothing. Their research puts the cost of a poor hire at mid manager level, on a salary of £42,000, at more than £132,000 once wasted training, lost productivity and increased turnover are counted. UK businesses, on the REC’s analysis, fail to hire the right person for two out of five roles.

The loaded cost has risen since. Employer National Insurance moved to 15% in April 2025 with the secondary threshold cut to £5,000, which widened the gap between what a salary looks like and what a hire costs.

At the top of the function the instability is visible in the data too. Spencer Stuart’s 2025 CMO Tenure Study found that only 66% of Fortune 500 companies had a chief marketing officer in the C-suite in 2024, roughly eight points down on the previous year. Whatever else that indicates, it does not suggest an appointment process that reliably produces the right result.

But the direct cost of the wrong hire is not the interesting number. The interesting number is the year.

A marketing hire made without a diagnosis does not fail immediately. They spend three months onboarding, three months building things, three months discovering that the things they built do not address the real constraint, and three months managing the resulting conversation. Twelve months later the business is not just out of pocket. It is a year further from the position it was trying to reach, and it has learned something it could have learned in a fortnight.

The pattern underneath

Nearly every marketing problem presented as a resourcing question turns out to be a decision that has not been made.

Sometimes it is a positioning decision. The business serves four types of client with four different value propositions and has never chosen which one it is built around, so the marketing tries to speak to all of them and lands with none.

Sometimes it is an ownership decision. Marketing sits partly with the managing director, partly with a sales lead, partly with an external supplier, and the reason nothing has momentum is that no single person can start or stop anything.

Sometimes it is an investment decision. The business wants growth that requires eighteen months of consistent effort and is evaluating the marketing quarterly. That is not a staffing gap. That is a mismatch between the ambition and the patience.

None of these gets fixed by adding a person. All of them get worse, because the new person becomes the visible thing that can be held accountable for a problem that was never theirs.

We have explored a related version of this in The Blind Spot in Strategic Decision-Making.

What to do instead of deciding blind

The alternative is not a lengthy consultancy process. It is a short, bounded piece of work that produces a defensible answer to the question you were about to guess at.

That means auditing what exists rather than what is believed to exist. It means being specific about the outcome the business needs, in commercial terms, over a defined period. It means identifying where the actual constraint sits, and testing that against evidence rather than against the loudest internal opinion. And it means only then asking what shape of resource addresses it.

Sometimes the honest output of that work is that the business needs a permanent marketing manager, and the diagnosis makes that appointment far more likely to succeed because the brief is real and the success measures exist. Sometimes it is that the direction is sound and the constraint is delivery, in which case what is needed is execution capacity rather than another opinion about strategy. Sometimes it is that the business needs senior judgement for a few days a month, with delivery resourced separately underneath it. And sometimes it is that the business needs to make a positioning decision first and should not hire anybody until it has.

All four are legitimate answers, and none of them is the senior version of the others. What matters is that they are answers rather than guesses.

The reframe

It is worth being direct about what this is really saying, because it can sound like a delaying tactic.

A hire is a commitment of somewhere between £50,000 and £150,000 of loaded cost over a year, plus a year of opportunity. A business would not make a capital investment of that size on the basis of a conversation and a feeling. It would want to know what problem the investment solves and what happens if it does not.

Marketing hires routinely get made on considerably less scrutiny than that, precisely because marketing is the area where the problem is hardest to articulate. The difficulty of articulating it is not a reason to skip the step. It is the reason the step exists.

If you want a defensible answer to the resourcing question before committing to it, a marketing audit will produce one. If the outcome is that you need senior judgement without a permanent appointment, our fractional CMO services exist for that. If it is that the thinking is already sound and what you lack is the capacity to act on it, an outsourced marketing department is the more useful answer. Our comparison of a fractional CMO, an agency and an in-house team sets out the trade-offs honestly, and if the choice is between the two models above, we have put them side by side in Fractional CMO vs Outsourced Marketing Department.