What Beauty Brands Get Wrong Hiring a CMO and How the Best Ones Fix It

Every week, I talk to founders and CEOs of beauty brands trying to hire a CMO. They want one person who can own the brand story and drive revenue growth. One person. One title. One salary.

That person is exceptionally rare. And the brands chasing them are losing months.

Unfortunately, this is a common recruiting approach at growth-stage beauty companies, roughly the $40M to $100M range, where the marketing function is under the most pressure. The org is too big to survive on founder-led brand energy, but often not yet structured to support two senior marketing leaders. So the search begins for a unicorn.

The unicorn almost never works out.

Why is it so hard to find one CMO who can run both brand and performance marketing in beauty?

Brand marketing and performance marketing are inherently different disciplines. They require different instincts and a different relationship with data.

A brand marketer builds equity over time. They think about how a product makes someone feel, the story behind the founder, and the emotional space the brand occupies. It is contemplative work with a longer lead time.

A performance marketer optimizes to capture emerging opportunities. They live in the numbers, move fast, and make decisions in days, sometimes hours. The pace and the pressure are completely different.

Every marketing leader develops a genuine instinct for one and a real gap in the other. When you ask one person to own both, something gives. It always does.

What does a CMO mis-hire cost a beauty brand at the growth stage?

This is a pattern we see consistently when brands come to us after a leadership transition has not gone as they had hoped. On paper, the person checked all the boxes. The pedigree was strong. A year or so in, the fit broke down in ways that were probably visible earlier than anyone wanted to admit.

A wrong hire at the CMO level typically costs 1.5 to 3 times the annual salary once you account for severance, lost momentum, and the cost of running a new search. At a growth stage when the margin for error is narrow, that is an expensive lesson to learn twice.

What I see most often is a mismatch at this inflection point. Brands still need some strategy, but a lot of hands-on execution to actually move the needle. Typically, the more senior the hire looks on paper, the more their experience has been built around overseeing larger teams, more support, and a heavier emphasis on strategy over doing. You end up paying a premium for that profile, but the role the business actually needs in that moment isn’t getting fulfilled.

Is the two-leader model the answer for beauty brands at the growth stage?

More and more, yes. A Head of Brand who owns creative, storytelling, and product narrative. A Head of Performance or Growth who owns paid, DTC, data, and channel strategy.

At around $75M to $100M in revenue, many brands are layering in a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Commercial Officer to sit above both and own the full commercial picture. Real accountability at every level. No more blurry ownership.

Some companies are not ready to fund both senior marketing hires at once. That is a real constraint and a fair one. A creative solution is a fractional leader covering one side while the business makes the permanent hire on the other and builds toward the full structure. One strong fractional operator in a clearly scoped seat keeps the function moving. One overloaded CMO trying to cover both brand and revenue growth does not.

How do you diagnose which marketing hire your beauty brand needs first?

The conversation that changes everything is usually the one before the search starts. When a CEO calls and the job description lists 14 core responsibilities spanning brand, performance, DTC, retail, and creative, that is the first thing we address. That is not one role. Scoping it that way guarantees a hard search and a short tenure.

The clarifying questions are simple. Where is the business losing momentum? Is the brand story doing its job, or is the brand competing mostly on price and promotion? Is the paid channel producing returns, or is it burning through the budget without clear attribution? The answers tell you which side of the marketing function needs a real leader first, and that shapes everything about how the search is built.

Channel mix matters here, too. What a brand doing 80% retail needs from a marketing leader is genuinely different from what a brand running 70% DTC needs. The role has to be built for how the business operates, not around a title that sounds appropriate.

At a retail-dominant beauty brand, a marketing leader is spending a disproportionate amount of time aligning with retail partners. They're thinking about sell-through, in-store velocity, merchandising calendars, and how the brand shows up on shelf at Sephora, Ulta, or Target. Their success is tied to doors, turns, and retail productivity. A lot of their headaches stem from factors they can’t fully control, such as inventory constraints, retailer timelines, or being one of many brands competing for attention in the same physical space.

At a DTC-dominant brand, that same leader is much closer to the levers. They’re living in CAC, LTV, conversion rates, and retention, and spending time optimizing performance marketing, site experience, and lifecycle. The pressure is more immediate and measurable, but the tradeoff is they own the number in a much more direct way. When growth stalls, there’s nowhere to hide.

If your CMO search is stalling, the role design is probably the reason.

Define the two jobs. Decide which one the business needs most. Then focus everything on winning over someone who is built to win.

ForceBrands works with CEOs and founders before the search starts, helping to define the role, structure, and timing so the best person for the job is set up to lead from day one. We have been doing this in beauty, wellness, and personal care for over 20 years.

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