Marketing team structures are mostly copied from companies four times the size, which is how a team of six ends up with three managers. The five shapes below are drawn at the headcounts they actually work at, from a team of one to a team of twenty, with the brand team treated separately because it is the one group whose output is not measured weekly and whose structure therefore follows different rules. Underneath all five is the same span arithmetic the rest of the company uses: about seven people to a manager, and a second layer when a group passes that.
One to three people: no structure, one list
A marketing team of three does not need a chart, it needs a list of what each person owns. The failure at this size is not structure, it is three people each doing a bit of everything, and the fix is a line of ownership per person rather than a box. Anybody drawing three layers on three people is copying a chart from a company with a hundred.
Four to nine people: one leader, owners underneath
One head of marketing, three or four owners with a number each, and specialists inside them. Seven is the point at which the leader's week runs out, which is the same span the rest of the company works to, and the first lead should be created in the largest group rather than the loudest one.
Ten to twenty, and the brand team's exception
Past ten, groups get leads and marketing operations appears as a shared seat. The brand marketing team is the exception to the pattern: it serves every group, its work is judged over quarters rather than weeks, and it works best as a small central team with dotted lines out rather than as people embedded in each group, where its work is always the thing that slips.
Questions people ask about marketing team structure
How many marketers per manager?
Six to eight, the same as everywhere else. Marketing is not a special case for span, whatever the number of channels suggests.
Should brand sit inside marketing?
Usually, with a dotted line to the chief executive in companies where brand is the strategy rather than a function.
What does modern mean in a marketing team structure?
In practice, operations as a seat rather than a task, and lifecycle owned by somebody. Both are additions to the same span arithmetic rather than replacements for it.