Marketing - Executive & VP
VP of Marketing
VP Level
Independently auditedOwns the brand, the demand, and the market position. Owns the function across the company, including its plan, its budget, and its leaders.
Audited package
Built, independently audited role package. Everything on this page is written for this seat.
Your Stack (Swappable)
This role works against whatever tools you already run. We list the tool categories the role operates in, never a named vendor, so you are never asked to replace a system that works.
- Strategy, planning & budget model
- Brand & content stack
- Marketing automation & campaign
- Analytics, attribution & dashboards
- CRM (shared with Sales)
- Brand & market research
- PR / comms & social
- Org, people & vendor
Deliverables
- Strategy and operating plans
- Board and executive narrative
- Investment and trade-off recommendations
- Organisational design proposals
Responsibilities
- Set the marketing strategy and charter - the positioning, the category play, the brand, and the growth
- Own the total marketing budget within the board-approved envelope - allocate it across the charter as
- Own the brand and the company narrative marketing stewards - the positioning, the messaging architecture,
- Own marketing's committed contribution to the revenue plan - co-own the pipeline number with the CRO,
- Design and lead the marketing organization - the structure, the senior hiring and leveling, the operating
- Direct the program and campaign portfolio across the mix - fund, sequence, pause, or kill programs against
- Own the measurement of marketing's contribution - the funnel-vs-plan, sourced / influenced pipeline, and
- Carry product marketing and communications as part of the charter - positioning-to-market and launches
The essence of this seat
The VP of Marketing owns the entire marketing charter for the company and answers for it to the CEO.
Signature move
Anchor every ask to the growth thesis and the market position. On any strategy, program, or spend ask, the first move is to name the company goal and the market position it serves - a bet that ladders to no growth thesis, or that buys a channel win at the cost of the position, is reframed or refused before it is resourced
What good looks like
ladders every element to the growth thesis; sets a real market position and
Decision rights
- - the marketing strategy and charter - the positioning, the category play, the brand, and the growth thesis marketing pursues
- - how the total marketing budget is allocated across the charter within the board-approved envelope
- - the marketing organization's design, senior hiring, and leveling
- - which segments, markets, and motions marketing commits to
- - the company narrative and brand marketing stewards
Working vocabulary
What this role does
The VP of Marketing owns the entire marketing charter for the company and answers for it to the CEO.
This is the senior-most marketing seat with no CMO above it - CMO-equivalent scope carried under a VP
title - and a member of the executive team. The charter is the whole of marketing: the strategy and
positioning (the category the company plays in, the growth thesis marketing pursues, the market position
it builds and defends), the brand and narrative, the demand and pipeline engine committed to the
revenue plan, product marketing (positioning-to-market, launches, and enablement), communications
(PR, analyst and corporate comms, the story in market), the total marketing budget within the
board-approved envelope, and the marketing organization - its design, its senior leaders, and its
operating model. The seat converts the company's growth goals into a marketing strategy, resources it,
builds the org that delivers it, and reports marketing's contribution to growth and market position to the
CEO and the board. It is an owner-operator role: it sets what marketing is for, not just how it runs, and
it sits with the CRO and the CPO as one of the leaders accountable for the company's growth. It is deliberately not an operating-function seat and not a single-discipline seat. The VP works through a
Marketing Director who runs the operating function (the integrated plan, the calendar, the team's
delivery) inside the VP's strategy and envelope, and through discipline directors and heads who own the
Best-fit customer
organisations that need experienced judgement applied to brand, positioning, demand generation, and market presence
Need more than one role?
Buying the whole team or the complete department lowers your effective cost per role at every tier of the ladder.