Have you seen those job ads on Seek?
“We’re looking for a creative individual who can design, write content, manage Google Ads, run SEO, produce campaigns, manage social media… and probably make the coffee and empty the dishwasher while they’re at it.”
For more than eleven years running a marketing agency (HGB, now Point B), I saw this mythical marketing unicorn show up in job descriptions almost daily.
The idea that one person could walk into a role and bring together strategic thinking, analytical capability, creative design, content creation, campaign execution and technical digital skills.
A creature so rare it might as well be mythical.
And yet businesses keep trying to hire it.
Let’s be honest for a moment.
When you hire someone into your accounting team, you don’t expect them to suddenly switch gears and write accounting stories. Their job is numbers. Financial thinking. Structure.
The same is true in marketing.
How many brilliant creatives do you know – photographers, designers, storytellers – who genuinely enjoy sitting down with an Excel spreadsheet building campaign budgets and analysing data?
And how many analytical marketing strategists do you know who want to spend their days designing Instagram tiles?
These are different skill sets.
Different brains.
Different types of work.
I do know one person who comes close to this mythical blend, Kylie Harcourt (but she’s a legend, and legends are rare).
So why do so many businesses still believe they can hire a single marketing unicorn?
Why businesses keep trying to hire the marketing unicorn
In many growing businesses, marketing responsibilities begin with the owner.
At the start this makes sense. Founders know the product, they know the customers, and they naturally take the lead on telling the story of the business.
But as the business grows, the workload grows too. Marketing becomes another hat the owner keeps wearing. Until, eventually the conversation happens, “We need marketing.”
And the next logical step seems simple enough.
“Let’s hire someone.”
The problem is that many businesses don’t fully understand the scope of marketing as a discipline. And the job description quickly becomes a wish list.
Someone who can do strategy
Create content
Run campaigns
Manage social media
Optimise the website
Analyse results
And keep everything moving
One role. One person. One mythical creature.
Marketing is not one job
The reality is that marketing is not a single skillset. It’s a collection of different disciplines working together.
Strategy and positioning
Brand and messaging
Content creation
Digital channels and campaigns
SEO and website performance
Analytics and reporting
Each of these areas requires different thinking.
Creative thinking.
Analytical thinking.
Strategic thinking.
Technical thinking.
Expecting one individual to excel across all of these areas is a bit like asking someone to run your finance, HR and legal departments at the same time.
Possible in theory. Rare in practice. And usually unrealistic.
What actually happens when businesses hire the unicorn
When a business hires someone expecting them to cover the full marketing spectrum, one of two things normally happens.
1. The person naturally focuses on the areas they are strongest in.
A great content creator produces excellent social posts and blogs.
A performance marketer runs digital campaigns.
A designer creates beautiful brand assets.
But the broader marketing strategy still sits with the owner, because no one else is driving it.
2. The role becomes overwhelming.
Too many expectations.
Too many directions.
Too many areas requiring expertise.
And marketing becomes reactive rather than strategic.
The business thinks they have “hired marketing”. But in reality, they’ve hired one piece of the marketing puzzle.
What growing businesses actually need instead
The issue is not that businesses shouldn’t hire marketing talent. They absolutely should. The issue is expecting one person to deliver every required function.
Growing businesses benefit from marketing leadership. Someone who understands how all the pieces fit together.
Someone who can define the strategy, prioritise the work, allocate the budget and bring the right skills into the mix at the right time.
This is where a Fractional CMO model works incredibly well.
Rather than trying to hire the mythical unicorn, businesses bring in senior marketing leadership on a fractional basis.
A Fractional CMO focuses on the strategic layer.
Clarifying positioning
Aligning marketing with business goals
Prioritising where effort and budget should go
And coordinating the specialists who deliver the work
Instead of expecting one person to do everything, the business builds a marketing system that actually works.
Marketing works best when leadership owns it
Great marketing rarely happens by accident. It happens when there is clarity around strategy, positioning and priorities. When the right people are doing the right work. And when someone is responsible for connecting it all together.
The marketing unicorn might make for a great job ad.
But in reality, what growing businesses need is something far more practical. Because when someone owns the strategy, everything else becomes clearer.
The message.
The channels.
The investment.
And the results.
Jacqui Gage-Brown
📷 Specialist athletes train for specific disciplines. Marketing talent is no different, there is no one person who does it all.
