VP of Marketing Role Misalignment: A Structural Failure

I came across a version of this story on LinkedIn last week. It made me angry in the specific way that only recognition can. I have been close enough to this situation to watch it happen in real time, and frustrated enough by it to still be thinking about it now.

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You Hired a VP of Marketing. Now They're Doing Busywork

In a nutshell, a company decides it needs marketing leadership. It hires accordingly, title and compensation to match. What it does not provide, because it has genuinely not thought it through, is a team, a budget, or a real seat at the table.

One Big Beautiful To-Do List

The senior hire arrives ready to build something. What she finds is a backlog. A website that needs updating. Sales decks that need formatting. A newsletter that apparently wrote itself before she arrived.

Nobody asks her to abandon strategy. It just happens, one urgent request at a time, until urgent becomes permanent and the role she signed up for becomes something else entirely.

Leadership grows frustrated. The pipeline has not moved. She grows frustrated too. She did not come here to be, as she put it to anyone who would listen, an expensive pair of hands.

Been There, Done That

They’re calling this dynamic “seniority inversion”. As someone that's experienced that directly, I prefer role misalignment, or, on less charitable days, the moment your C-suite dreams go to die.

Enter the senior hire (yes, me) and what quickly becomes evident is that there's not marketing team, no realistic budget, and no real influence. In my case, I walked into a void and handled everything alone. Over time, the role morphs into something unrecognizable.

I noticed right away that this was a structural failure, and the organization designed it in before I even walked through the door.

The Call Is Coming From Inside the House

McKinsey has been documenting this disconnect for years. CEOs and CMOs routinely disagree about what marketing is even for. CMOs report that the full scope of their role is consistently underestimated. Some CEOs see marketing as peripheral. Others treat it as a cost center rather than a growth engine.

None of this is malicious. Most of it is a failure to ask the right questions before posting the role.

Clarity Against the Machine

Over time, I learned that these work pretty well:

• What do you need marketing to do in the next 12 months?

Strategic hires need strategic infrastructure. If you want brand repositioning, growth architecture, or just looking ahead, then you need to create the conditions that make the work possible.

• Can you fund what you are asking for?

  A VP without a team, a technology stack, or meaningful resources is not a marketing leader. She is a contractor with a better title and considerably higher expectations.

  
  

• Is marketing actually in the room?

Revenue discussions, pricing decisions, client retention strategy. If the marketing leader isn't present for those conversations, they cannot influence their outcomes.

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Make Marketing Matter

Build the conditions for good work to be delivered. The problem was never the person, it was the structure.

Respect the craft, people. Then fund it.