Short post, because the term doesn't need a long one. It covers three different arrangements and the useful thing is telling them apart.
The three meanings
1. Advising a sitting CMO
You have a CMO. They're capable and facing something outside their experience: a new market, a channel they've never run, a reorganization, or the step up from a five-person team to a fifteen-person one.
A CMO consultant here is a senior peer. A few hours a month, no decision rights, no team. Coaching and pattern-matching from someone who has done the thing your CMO is about to do.
This is the most straightforwardly useful version and the least discussed. It's cheap relative to the alternative, which is your marketing leader learning by trial and error at your expense.
2. Advising a CEO with no CMO
No marketing leader. The CEO is effectively running marketing, alongside everything else, and wants senior input on the decisions.
Useful in the short term and unstable in the long term. The CEO is still doing the job, just with better advice, and the constraint at your size is usually the CEO's available hours rather than the quality of their marketing thinking.
Worth doing while you decide what leadership arrangement to put in place. Worth being honest that it's a holding pattern rather than a solution.
3. A fractional CMO with different wording
Some fractional CMOs use consulting language because it's the vocabulary their buyers use, or because it feels less presumptuous than claiming a title at a company they've just met.
Check what's actually on offer. If they'll own a number, manage your team, and make decisions, that's a fractional CMO regardless of the label. The distinction that matters is decision rights, not vocabulary.
Which one you need
One question: do you have a marketing leader?
Yes, and they're good. You want version one. Advisory support for them. Cheap, effective, and it develops the person you already have rather than working around them.
Yes, and they're struggling. Work out first whether it's capability or scope. A leader failing because the role was defined badly won't be fixed by advice. That pattern is worth reading about before you spend anything.
No. You want leadership rather than advice. Fractional, interim, or permanent depending on your situation, and the decision tree is here. Advisory support to a CEO who is already stretched adds information without adding capacity, and information isn't usually the binding constraint.
What advisory support actually looks like
For the first version, which is the one worth doing well, the shape is consistent:
- A monthly session of ninety minutes, structured around whatever is live rather than a curriculum
- Availability for the two or three decisions a quarter that genuinely need a second opinion
- Reviewing the board materials before they go to the board
- An honest read on the team structure and the hiring plan
- Occasional direct involvement in something specific, such as sitting in on a candidate interview
What it isn't: a standing meeting that becomes a status update. If the sessions turn into your CMO reporting progress to an outsider, the arrangement has lost its point and should be stopped.
What to look for
Different criteria from hiring a fractional CMO, and worth naming.
They've run a function at your next stage, not your current one. The value is in seeing round the corner. Someone who has only operated at your current size can sympathize but not much else.
They're comfortable having no authority. Some senior operators can't advise without wanting to take over. That undermines your CMO, which is the opposite of the goal.
Your CMO chooses them. An advisor imposed by the CEO on a marketing leader reads as surveillance, and it will be treated as such. If your CMO isn't enthusiastic about the person, don't do it.
That last point is the one CEOs get wrong most often, usually with good intentions. Advisory support works when the person being advised wants it. It fails, quietly and completely, when it doesn't.