When the marketing seat empties
My marketing person left. Do I need a coordinator or a strategist?
Replacing the person who left with the same seat reproduces the same gap. A coordinator runs a strategy someone else authored: they schedule the posts, brief the agency, keep the calendar moving. They do not decide what the marketing says or who it is for. I'm Daniel Fox, a fractional CMO. If strategy is what actually left, another set of hands hires the gap back.
A coordinator runs the plan; a strategist decides what the plan is
These are two different jobs that often wear the same title. A coordinator turns a strategy into motion: they schedule, brief, chase, and report. Give them a clear plan and they keep it running well. A strategist authors the plan itself: who the customer is, what you stand for, what to say first, where to spend, what to stop. One executes decisions; the other makes them. The trouble starts when the title on the org chart hides which of the two you actually had.
Tenure does not settle it. Someone can hold a marketing title for eight years and have spent all eight coordinating, because no one above them was authoring strategy either, so the role quietly defaulted to keeping things moving. The work looked busy and the reports looked full. The number rode on referrals the whole time. When that person leaves, the seat that opens up is labeled the job they held, not the job that was missing.
That is why a like-for-like backfill so often disappoints. You replace a coordinator with a coordinator and the marketing keeps moving and still does not decide anything. The strategy was never in the seat to begin with, so a fresh occupant of the same seat inherits the same silence. The question is not how senior the last person sounded. It is whether anyone was ever deciding what the marketing should do.
The eight-year director who was a coordinator the whole time
A profitable company loses its long-tenured head of marketing and starts a search to replace the title: director, eight years, ran everything. Then you look at what the role actually did. It managed the calendar, briefed the agency, posted the content, and assembled the monthly report. Every real decision about who the company was talking to and why had been made years ago, by the founder, in passing, and never revisited. The director kept a settled plan in motion. No one had reopened it since.
So the gap is not eight years of expertise walking out the door. The gap is that strategy was never being authored, and the departure just made the absence visible. Hire another capable coordinator and the calendar fills back up, the agency gets briefed, the reports resume, and the number keeps doing exactly what it did before. The thing the business actually needs is the thing it never had: someone deciding what the marketing is for.
Diagnose the function before you backfill the title
Before you write the job description, answer one question honestly: in the last two years, did anyone decide what the marketing should say and to whom, or did it run on decisions made long ago? If the strategy is sound and the gap is genuinely execution, a coordinator is the right, affordable hire, and you should make it without overthinking it. If the number has been flat while the activity stayed busy, the missing role was never the one that left.
When strategy is the gap, the fix is senior judgment, not more hands. That can be a full-time leader if you can fund and attract one, or a fractional CMO who takes the strategic seat part-time and directs the coordination and the agencies underneath it. The trap to avoid is the underpowered in-between: a junior strategist you still have to direct, which just moves the deciding back onto your desk. The longer version of that trade-off, agency versus freelancer versus fractional leader, is laid out in who actually answers for the outcome.
Either way, the choice gets easier the moment you stop sizing the hire by the title that opened up and start sizing it by the decision that has been going unmade.
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