Answers
Do you need a fractional CMO or a marketing agency?
If the open question is what to say and to whom, the company needs marketing leadership, not more output. Fractional leadership fits when the decisions — position, sequence, which markets, which audiences, who to hire — are still unresolved; an execution partner fits when those decisions are already made and the work is to run them well. Choosing output while the position is unsettled is how budget gets spent on activity nobody can defend.
The symptom to look for
Several channels are running, each defensible on its own, and the company still cannot state its position in one sentence that a partner or an allocator would repeat. That is a leadership gap, and no volume of content closes it.
What fractional leadership covers
For teams that need senior marketing leadership without a full-time hire, BMB holds the marketing function directly — strategy, the team and execution — for a defined period of company-building. It ends with a position the company owns, and usually with a team and a sequence that can be run without us.
Where an execution mandate is the better answer
Where the position is settled and the need is a launch, a market entry, a communications programme or press in a specific venue, a defined project is the cleaner arrangement. It is scoped to the objective, and it does not ask the company to hand over a function it already runs.
How the two are decided here
Engagements are taken by selection. The first conversation is a strategy call about the market you are entering and the decision in front of you; the shape of the engagement follows from that rather than preceding it. If a retainer is not the right instrument, we say so.
Decide which instrument fits.
Tell us where the marketing function sits today and what the next ninety days have to achieve. We will say which arrangement we would recommend, including when it is not us.