THE QUESTIONS I ACTUALLY GET ASKED.

Carries the marketing leadership job without the full-time seat. That means owning the commercial result rather than the campaign: what marketing is for, what it is measured on, who is doing it, and what gets cut.

In practice it is a standing seat at the table on a monthly basis, brought to a business that needs executive marketing judgement more often than it needs a permanent executive salary.

When the decisions are bigger than the volume of work. A full-time CMO is right when there is a permanent department to run. A fractional one is right when you need the judgement — what to build, what to stop, how to sequence it — more than you need someone in the building every day.

The other honest trigger: when you are about to spend serious money on marketing technology and nobody in the room has done it before at that scale.

Three. A two-week AI diagnostic that establishes where AI genuinely earns its place and where it is an expensive way to do what you already do — you get a ranked set of decisions, not a capability map. A ten-week sprint from decision to something running in production. Or a standing fractional CMO and board advisory seat on a monthly basis.

The first two are fixed in scope and duration. That is deliberate: an open-ended engagement rewards the wrong thing.

Fees are set on the brief rather than published as a rate card, because the two-week diagnostic and a standing board seat are not the same purchase and a single number would mislead on both.

What moves it: the number of markets, whether the work is a decision or a build, and how much of the delivery is yours versus mine. Ask and you will get a number before you get a proposal.

Your team, wherever the capability exists. The point of the work is that it still runs after I leave, and a programme delivered entirely by an outsider leaves with the outsider.

Where a capability genuinely is not there, that is a finding worth stating plainly rather than quietly filling.

Where it changes the economics of something you already do at volume, not where it produces a new thing to demo. The honest test is whether the cost per unit of useful output falls and stays fallen once the novelty has gone.

The reverse is the common and expensive mistake: buying the technology and then looking for the argument it supports. Positioning and value proposition first, automation on top of it — the other way round produces efficient marketing of the wrong argument.

Write down the decision the tool is supposed to improve, and how you would know it had. If that sentence is hard to write, the tool is not the problem you have.

Then check the measurement. A fried chicken outlet once reported zero waste every day; the manager had simply stopped cooking at five, six hours before closing. Measure the proxy and the proxy is what you will get — and a new tool pointed at the wrong proxy just gets you there faster.

It changes the cost of marketing, not the reason people buy. The work that disappears is the work that was always mechanical; the judgement about what to say, to whom, and why anyone should care does not become cheaper because generating the words did.

The teams that struggle are the ones that treated the mechanical part as the job.

Why organisations produce so much activity and so little movement. It is co-authored with Richard Lees, published by Wiley in 2022, and it was an Amazon best-seller.

The argument runs on three things that only work together: a clear vision with indicators that genuinely measure it, a team aligned behind that vision, and an honest reading of the market you are actually in. Line those up and the customer experience follows. Leave one out and you get activity.

Telecoms, energy, consumer goods, financial services, retail and travel among others, across roughly fifty markets, with platform work delivered in eighty-eight countries.

Localisation turns out to be a legal and cultural problem long before it is a translation one, which is the sort of thing you only learn by getting it wrong somewhere first.

Because the results are theirs and the confidences are real. Every case study on this site is a genuine engagement described by sector, and every one is here only because it has a hard number attached — engagements without a verifiable figure are left out rather than dressed up.

If you want the names, ask on a call. What is not going to happen is a logo wall that implies more than the work justified.

The diagnostic is two weeks and can usually begin inside a fortnight of a first conversation. A sprint needs a decision behind it, so the honest answer is that the scoping conversation is the slow part, not the calendar.

A standing advisory seat is a longer conversation, because it should be.