When do startups need a Marketing Ph.D?

My colleague Francis Turner showed me this post from Darren Barefoot, who describes a common issue in particular in tech startups: when to hire the marketing heavyweight if you are not a marketer yourself? As Darren points out correctly, for a startup a marketing person must be many people at once and must have recent hands-on experience doing them. While strategic thinking is of course also important at a startup what counts even more is to do the most with your limited budget. The often better solution is to get part time a marketing expert on board to do what is needed a few days per month. That saves not only money but most importantly does not frustrate either side: not the marketing top expert being bored not being able to do what he/she would like to do with the right budget and the startup not having the feeling that the person is simply overqualified for a hands-on job.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Best Practice Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.