A first Head of Digital Marketing, found by targeting structure, not brands

The brief was a Head of Digital Marketing: the client's first dedicated marketing hire. Until then the founder had run all marketing personally, since the business started, so this was not a replacement or an expansion. It was the moment marketing became a function.

The profile was the difficulty. The role needed someone who had run full-scale campaigns for organisations ten times the client's size, with international exposure and a real understanding of marketing at global scale, while still being hands-on at every stage from planning to launch, even with a team to lead. Most people with that campaign experience stopped doing the work themselves long ago.

The founder also ruled out hiring from direct competitors. The market had already heard the competitor set's communication, and repeating it was precisely what the hire was not for.

The profile pointed to a specific kind of employer: enterprise-scale companies that run lean teams and international marketing communication. The early target was a multinational consumer goods group whose marketing function is divided across thirty-plus product verticals, effectively thirty companies under one umbrella, each with different consumers requiring different communication on different platforms. That structure produces exactly the versatility, flexibility, ownership and international exposure the role needed. The search targeted the structure rather than any one brand.

The approach landed at close to the ideal moment. The candidate had recently moved from that environment into ecommerce and was actively looking for a role in software and technology. The open question was culture shock: a smaller, less structured organisation with fewer resources than they were used to. What made it work was that they had already operated inside lean verticals, and had the attitude to match.