Fractional marketing has been around for years. But most of what's written about it comes from the B2B world, and the job described there isn't the job I do. If you run a consumer brand and you're trying to work out whether fractional makes sense, this is the honest version.

The short definition

A fractional marketing director does the job a full-time marketing director would do — owns the strategy, runs the plan, is accountable for the number — on a fraction of the week. Typically one to two days. Embedded in your team, or working alongside whoever you already have.

The important word is accountable. A consultant hands over recommendations and leaves. A freelancer executes a brief someone else wrote. A fractional director owns the outcome: if the plan doesn't work, that's mine to explain and mine to fix.

Why the B2B version doesn't translate

Most fractional CMOs work with B2B firms, and in that world the job leans toward governance: aligning marketing behind a sales team, building process, getting marketing a seat at the table. Useful work. But it's shaped by one structural fact — in B2B, sales closes the revenue and marketing supports it.

Consumer brands don't have that structure. There's no sales team to hand off to. Marketing is the revenue engine, and the fractional job is closer to running it than advising it. The feedback is daily — revenue, contribution margin, cohort behaviour — and there's nowhere to hide behind "pipeline influenced."

That changes the skill set too. In B2B you can lead credibly while staying channel-light. In DTC you can't. The strategy and the machinery — the media, the CRM, the attribution, the margin structure — have to live in the same head, because the decisions run through both on the same day.

The two situations where it makes sense

In my experience brands arrive at fractional in one of two states.

The gap. Revenue's coming in and there's a team doing the work, but nobody senior owns the strategy behind it. Decisions get made channel by channel — an agency optimising its lane, a marketer running their function — and no one is accountable for the whole number. The brand isn't broken. It's uncoordinated.

The plateau. Marketing exists and used to work. Now acquisition costs are climbing, growth is flattening, and more spend isn't moving it. Usually this is the performance ceiling: the brand has harvested the demand that existed and never built the machinery that creates more. The approach needs rebuilding, not another tactic.

The common thread: both need senior thinking, and neither needs it five days a week. A full-time marketing director at £80–120k plus hiring risk is the right answer eventually. For most brands between start-up and £30m, it's a big bet placed before the strategy exists to justify it.

What the work actually looks like

Some of the week is commercial: rebuilding a forecast the day reality disagrees with it, sizing a category before a pound moves, sitting in the trading meeting rather than reading the minutes.

Some of it is creative: briefing work and pushing it back until it's distinctive rather than fine, deciding what the brand says and what it refuses to say.

And some of it is orchestration — briefing and managing agencies, which is often part of the job. Agencies are excellent at execution. What they can't be, structurally, is neutral about strategy: advice tends to arrive shaped like the services behind it. Part of the fractional role is being the person in the room with nothing to sell on the back of the recommendation.

What it shouldn't be

A few honest boundaries, because the category doesn't always draw them.

It shouldn't be a dependency. Everything worth building — the strategy, the forecasts, the learnings — should be documented and owned by the client, so the value stays when the engagement ends. Some of my engagements end with the client hiring a full-time director into a function that now works. That's a good outcome, not a lost account.

It shouldn't be a cheaper hire. The pitch across most of the category is senior expertise at a fraction of the cost, and the cost maths is real. But if price is the whole reason, a part-time senior marketer is probably the better buy. Fractional earns its place when what's missing is the thinking and the accountability, not just the hours.

And it shouldn't start with tactics. Every engagement I run starts the same way: a diagnosis of the market, the brand and the numbers, before anything gets committed. If someone offers you a fractional engagement that opens with a channel plan, you've hired an agency with a nicer job title.

How to decide

Three questions worth asking yourself:

Does anyone currently own your marketing number — not a channel, the number? If the answer is a list of people, it's no one.

Is your growth getting more expensive? If each increment of revenue costs more than the last, the problem is upstream of the channels, and upstream is where a fractional director works.

Would you hire a full-time marketing director if it were free? If yes, fractional is probably the right shape now. If no — if the real need is more hands — hire the hands.

If those questions land somewhere uncomfortable, that's usually the sign it's worth a conversation. Mine are free, thirty minutes, and honest — including when the honest answer is that you don't need me.