The Inside View
With Duncan McNeill
The Inside View goes beyond the headlines. It's where we share candid insights from our client meetings — the trends they're navigating, the talent challenges they're facing, and what it all means for the market.
The Inside View goes beyond the headlines. It's where we share candid insights from our client meetings — the trends they're navigating, the talent challenges they're facing, and what it all means for the market.
I recently met with a Head of Marketing at a leading Australian FMCG business who shared a challenge I've been hearing more frequently across the market. Strong Brand and Senior Brand Managers aren't hard to find. Ones who can also navigate performance marketing are.
At first glance, that might seem surprising. There are plenty of experienced FMCG marketers with excellent brand-building credentials. Yet the same issue continues to come up in hiring conversations. Businesses aren't just looking for traditional brand expertise anymore. Increasingly, they're looking for marketers who can operate comfortably across both brand and performance.
What struck me during the conversation was that this isn't really a talent shortage. It's the result of how many marketing teams were designed.
For years, FMCG businesses separated responsibilities. Brand teams focused on consumer insights, innovation, portfolio management, and long-term brand building. Digital teams managed acquisition, analytics, paid media, SEO, and performance channels, while agencies often handled much of the specialist work. It was a structure that made perfect sense and, for a long time, worked extremely well.
The challenge is that today's capability requirements look very different from the capabilities those structures were designed to develop. Many marketers became highly successful because they specialised in exactly what their role required. Now that digital channels sit at the centre of commercial performance, businesses are looking for a broader skill set than many traditional FMCG career paths naturally provide.
One thing I've noticed over the past 12 months is how often performance marketing now appears in otherwise traditional FMCG briefs. Most of the Brand Manager and Senior Brand Manager searches I've worked on recently have specifically asked for exposure to performance marketing.
This isn't because businesses are suddenly looking for digital specialists. It's because digital has become central to commercial performance. Marketing leaders increasingly want people who can contribute to conversations about SEO, SEM, attribution, campaign effectiveness, and customer acquisition alongside the traditional responsibilities of brand management.
That's a very different expectation from the one that existed five or ten years ago.
This shift has created a noticeable divide in the market. There are plenty of marketers with strong brand credentials and plenty of specialists with deep digital expertise. The candidates attracting the strongest demand are often those who can bridge both worlds.
They're comfortable discussing brand equity and commercial outcomes in the same conversation. They understand consumer behaviour but are equally comfortable interpreting campaign performance and using data to influence decisions. Those marketers aren't necessarily better than everyone else. They're simply aligned with where the market is heading.
What makes this particularly interesting is that many employers are now searching for skills that weren't considered essential when much of today's talent pool was developing their careers. As a result, businesses often find themselves competing for a relatively small group of candidates who possess both traditional FMCG brand credentials and meaningful performance marketing exposure.
In some organisations, the answer will be hiring. In others, it will be development. Either way, the issue isn't going away. The gap between traditional brand management and modern performance marketing capability is becoming more visible with every hiring process.
The conversation wasn't really about performance marketing. It was about how quickly market expectations can change.
FMCG businesses built marketing teams around specialisation because that's what the market required at the time. Today's environment demands something different. The strongest marketers I speak with aren't choosing between brand storytelling and performance marketing. They understand how the two work together.
Increasingly, that's not a bonus. It's the expectation.