Your marketing director will be your go-to person for undertaking successful strategies to market and sell your products and services. Your organization will want to bring on candidates who have an in-depth working knowledge of marketing so that the amount of time spent onboarding your new marketing director can be reduced. They should also come in with some ideas about how to leverage their past marketing experiences to enhance your organization’s existing marketing strategy or conduct a turnaround campaign. What to look for in an answer:

• Example of a successful past marketing campaign
• Industry-specific marketing experience
• Creativity and flexibility

In today’s world, consumers are increasingly shifting to online platforms to gather information about interesting products and make purchases. Online reviews can be a large factor in whether a consumer decides to buy your organization’s product or a competitor’s. As such, it is important that your marketing director has a clear grasp of digital media’s position in today’s marketing industry and has a clear conception of how your organization can best leverage online resources to drive profitability. What to look for in an answer:

• Experience in digital media marketing
• Ideas for how your organization can leverage digital experiences
• Critical thinking and business acumen

Your marketing team may decide to collaborate with individuals who have many followers on their social media and other digital platforms. If done properly, these types of collaborations can bring your product to the attention of hundreds of thousands of potential target users at a minimal cost, which would help drive sales. However, many celebrities are known to have strong personalities or may have tight schedules with sudden changes, which may make them difficult to collaborate with. Your candidate should have a process for dealing with sudden changes in scheduling. What to look for in an answer:

• Example of working under stressful conditions
• Clear strategy for dealing with the situation
• Strong communication skills

Your organization will not stop providing services and goods because of an economic downturn. In fact, recessions are critical times for your organization, and your marketing director should have a clear strategy to help your company maintain sales levels and stay in business. The top marketing directors will understand how to leverage countercyclical trends to actually increase sales during an economic crunch, and these candidates are the ones that you should seek to bring onto your team. What to look for in an answer:

• Recognition of the types of business needs a company faces during a recession
• A clear marketing strategy for tackling recession
• Flexibility and creativity

Depending on your organization’s target consumer sector, there are a variety of ways to reach your audience to market your goods. For instance, younger generations are increasingly turning towards computer-enabled channels like Facebook or YouTube, but a large portion of the market might still rely on television advertisements. Your marketing director should understand what sectors your offered products best serve and how the consumers in those sectors prefer to receive information about new products. What to look for in an answer:

• Clear and logical reasoning
• Explanation for choosing a particular marketing channel
• Understanding of company’s target audience

Marketing directors are responsible for planning and implementing marketing strategies to meet the firm's business objectives. Interviewers will ask this question to find out if candidates can handle difficult situations with grace. An experienced marketing director will assess the situation to decide what will the best stance to take, and, depending on that, will acknowledge the problem by adopting a sincere, conciliatory and sympathetic approach.

The candidate's answer should emphasize:

• Helpful attitude
• Confidence
• Good communication skills

A sample response would be something like this: