Why Marketing & Brand Directors should be a partnership like an Art Director & Copywriter
These two roles are intrinsically linked but with different areas of focus and expertise.
I have worked in an Art Director / Copywriter team for ads for years with a similar goal but a different angle. Now I am a Brand Director working with Marketing Directors in a similar tandem.
Modern Marketing Directors are really being recruited as ‘Growth Marketeers’. This means their jobs focus a lot more on showing ROI on the marketing budget than they used to. With modern measuring and digital marketing it is much easier to account for ROI on your marketing budget so this is a natural development. BUT this means that Marketing Directors tend to be recruited from Business backgrounds and therefore never had the formal Creative background training a Branding or Creative Director does.
Creative Directors are often very focused on the visual content and perhaps have less experience in analysing data than a Strategy Director might. So if you have a Strategy Director as well then great but often client-side you do not.
The Brand Director sits between these two roles - Creative and Strategy and can keep an eye on how external factors influence internal decisions and vice-versa. This is where keeping the Brand Director external has its advantages. Keeping them external to the business in a freelance or non-full-time position means they stay objective to the needs of the user. Over time, being in a business, you can lose sight of this. This will depend on the size of the company, the volume of creative output and other roles in place.
Let’s now talk about why the Marketing Director and Brand Director roles work so well together. Though many Marketing Director roles are business-focused, that doesn’t mean to say they are not creative. Quite the opposite as in most cases they are expected to do the two roles. Creativity, however, is often best with a partner as the advertising industry’s Art Director / Copywriter (Creative team) partnership proves so well. An idea is created then the partner takes this seed and looks at it from a new angle that the initial person hadn’t, Then when it develops, the partner feeds off that idea with new angles and so it grows. Also, having two different focuses or left brain/right brain (in some cases) creates more powerful ideas.
This is not to say that good ideas can’t come from everywhere or anyone but with the experience that Marketing Directors and Brand Directors have, they tend to get to a solution faster and know the parameters in which the idea is realistic and cost-effective.
If you are a Marketing Director reading this who feels like they are doing two roles, then get in touch as I work freelance and often have time in my month/weekly schedule for a new client weather direct or agency.
