603. Hire brand first 🙏
A radical idea for team-building
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Hire brand first
Tips on making your first marketing team hire
Not that I advocate for anyone losing sleep over digital marketing (I’m a firm believer that there is no such thing as a marketing emergency), but one of the biggest stressors for early-stage CEOs and heads of marketing is getting that first marketing hire right.
Who should be the first marketer that you hire?
This question keeps company leaders up at night because there are so many different directions that the hire could go. Not only must you figure out the right skillset for this hire, but you have to consider seniority, experience, and what skills you want in-house and what you want to outsource to an agency partner.
If you are a co-founder or C-level executive hiring your team’s very first marketing leader, what type of background do you want in this “Head of” hire?
If you are a head of marketing, looking to build your team with your first direct report, what role do you start with?
Typically, whether you’re a CEO or head of marketing, you’re going to choose between the three main skillsets of marketing: brand marketing (“who you are” as a company), product marketing (“what you sell”), and growth marketing (“how you sell it.”) But then the choices spiral from there.
So, where do you begin?
Conventional wisdom says, “Hire product marketing first.” 👏
Until now, the most common answer to the hiring question has gone like this:
Hire product marketing first
Outsource your growth marketing to an agency
Save brand marketing for a later stage once you’re well past product-market fit
The reasoning goes like this: Product marketers are great at crafting product positioning and making sales assets for your team and website. They are also quite collaborative and cross-functional, working with your product team and your sellers (especially at B2B businesses). Growth marketing, early on, very often takes the form of digital advertising like search ads, which is a channel that can be managed quite effectively by outsiders; you may choose to bring it in-house once your growth mix gets more complex or you want to focus on better spend and efficiency.
Brand eats last, which happens because brand work is discounted as too top-of-funnel to matter right now, or because the founding team doesn’t value brand, or because they’ve already paid to have a logo, colors, and website (which is all brand is, right???).
Having seen this team-building philosophy first-hand across several in-house roles, I have a slightly different take on things now.
2025 and beyond says, “Hire brand marketing first!” 🦄
Yes, I am aware this is exactly backwards from how it usually happens today.
But hear me out:
Brand has never been more important than it is today
In a noisy, homogenized world companies competing for attention, the single most effective strategy for standing out is to tell an authentic, compelling story through a consistent, memorable brand
Brand foundations are accelerants to everything else you do with your marketing
Brand makes everything better 👆 — your marketing, your sales, your fundraising, your customer experience
Product marketing is uber-important, but you can’t truly begin effective positioning work without knowing why your business exists in the first place. I have spoken with countless founders who want to reverse-engineer the brand story after the product finds traction; it’s just not as effective that way.
Growth marketing is hugely valuable as you scale, but its ROI will be suppressed if you’re not consistent with your story. It’s way more than just making ads that look good and sound good; you want to advertise with a story that is meaningful and real—because today’s customers are too savvy and will spot a fraud.
Q: But isn’t brand marketing a luxury at such an early stage of team growth?
If you were hiring a brand marketer whose only contribution would be brand strategy, then yes, that’d be a little too specific. But many brand marketers are creative powerhouses who take brand foundations and turn them into wildly successful campaigns, content, and engagement. Find yourself one of these folks!
(We have a bunch in our Bonfire network, if you need one.)
It’s likely that your brand marketer will be talented with coming up with your foundational strategy and then they may also specialize in one of these early-stage-critical areas:
PR & Comms
Social media and promotion
Audience development
Market research and customer care
And the list of skills goes on and on. Brand marketing is one of the most diffuse departments in all of marketing. Brand marketers can do a lot.
Q: But what if you’re already pretty good with story?
Brand strategy is a specific discipline that benefits greatly from a subject matter expert running the show. Yes, your CEO might make a compelling pitch to their investors, but do they understand the nuance of brand identity and personality? Unlikely.
The most helpful way to navigate a situation like this is to step back and take stock of everyone’s skillsets. The most common paths look like this:
There is no marketer at all on the team. Then hire a Head Of Marketing with a strong background in brand.
There is a Head of Marketing already on the team.
Great! If this person has a background in brand, then their first hire can be someone with a product marketing or growth marketing skillset
Or else if this person lacks a brand marketing background, then their first hire can be a brand marketer
Note that in neither scenario is the CEO the brand marketer. Although they may be tempted to be!
Q: But what if we really, really, seriously aren’t going to hire brand marketing first? I mean, come on.
If all else fails and you cannot make a brand marketer your first hire, then at the very least hire a brand marketing agency to build your foundations before you get too far ahead with all your other marketing.
I’m biased (since I run a brand marketing agency), but the initial investment in foundations will do wonders to all your marketing efforts that come afterward. Find yourself a wonderful agency partner who can give you what you need: purpose, mission, values; brand identity and personality; brand narratives; visual identity even. These building blocks will enable whoever your first marketing hire will be—whether they’re a brand specialist or not.
Over to you
In your experience, how radical is hiring brand first? Have you been part of an organization where brand marketers were there from day one? I’d love to hear from you!
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
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