Marketing Interview Questions

Reported by candidates at L'Oréal USA, Kao, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Capital One Auto Finance, Advisory Board, NCR and Rapleaf — in near-identical two-word forms. One L'Oréal USA report put it as "Why the Beauty Industry and why L'Oreal."

Marketing is the one profession where this question has a right answer available to you, because you are being hired to have opinions about their brand and you can form one for free the night before.

The shape: one specific thing they do, one specific thing you would test, and why the second follows from the first. Not admiration — diagnosis. "Your ads all sell the ingredient. Your reviews all talk about how long the bottle lasts. That gap is the campaign I'd want to run."

The trap is a fluent answer about the category. "I've always been passionate about beauty" is the answer of someone who applied to eleven companies that afternoon, and it is heard that way.

Reported by candidates at SchoolDude.com as "What could we do to market ourselves better?", at Simply Smart Technology as "How will you improve our marketing plan?", and at D2 DATA DRIVEN SOFTWARE as "How would you update or change our web site."

The instinct is to soften it. Resist that. A hedged answer here reads as either no opinion or no preparation, and both are fatal.

The structure that works is small and concrete: name one page, one ad, one email, one shelf. Say what it is trying to do. Say why you think it isn't doing it. Then propose the cheapest possible test rather than a rebrand — a headline change, a different landing page, one week of budget moved. Proposing a rebrand to a company that just paid for one is how a strong answer becomes a bad one.

Reported by candidates at Dick's Sporting Goods, phrased simply as "Dick's Sporting Goods competition?" A candidate at Eli Lilly reported being asked about tailored therapeutics and why Lilly is different from J&J, Abbott and others.

Name three, and make one of them a competitor they might not name themselves — the substitute rather than the rival, the thing customers do instead of buying anything. That answer separates people who read the About page from people who thought about the customer.

Reported by candidates at Disney Interactive Studios as "What website besides Disney.com do you think is executed effectively?" and at Kraft Foods as "What is your favorite commercial and why" and "Tell me about a well marketed product".

Have one ready, and make it explainable in mechanism rather than in taste. Why it worked, who it was aimed at, what it must have cost, what you would have measured. "It made me laugh" is not an answer from a marketer.

Notice the phrasing in the Disney Interactive Studios report: besides their own. Praising the interviewer's work when they asked you not to is a comprehension failure before it is a flattery failure.

Reported by candidates at Marketo as "Explain the breadth of all that Marketo does." A Kimbia candidate reported being asked what platform the company's website runs on, and a Coraid candidate reported a question about how much they knew about the storage industry, truncated in the original report.

Answer this in the customer's words, not the company's. If you can say who buys it, roughly what it costs, and what they were doing before they bought it, you are already ahead of the room.

Reported by candidates at Pittsburgh Steelers ("What is your definition of marketing?"), PepsiCo ("How do you define Marketing?") and Microsoft ("What does branding mean to you?"). A separate Microsoft report gives the sharper cousin: "What is the difference betwen strategy and goal." [sic]

These sound like philosophy and are actually a filter. Answer in one sentence, then immediately spend the rest of the answer on an example from your own work. A definition with no example is a student's answer; an example with no definition is a technician's. They want both, in that order, quickly.

Reported by candidates at Mars Incorporated, and the phrasing in the report is unusually candid: "Tell me when a crossfunctional sabotaged one of your projects, what did you do?"

Marketing is the function with the least direct authority and the most dependencies, so this question is not really about conflict. It is about whether you can get something shipped through people who do not report to you and do not share your deadline.

Reported by candidates at Kindred Healthcare, Advisory Board, Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods in several forms; one Dell candidate reported being asked about a disagreement with a senior manager in a previous role, and how they handled it.

Keep the seniority gap in view. The version of this story where you were right and the director was wrong needs to end with you having been persuasive, not vindicated.

Reported by candidates at Procter & Gamble — "Give an example of a time when you received data from multiple sources, research, client, focus groups, etc and had to bring it together and analyze it." A S.C. Johnson report puts a shorter version to an intern.

Say which source you trusted and why. The answer that treats all sources as equally valid is the answer of someone who has never had to make the call.

This one comes from an employer-facing hiring template rather than a candidate report, and we say so because the distinction matters: it is what interviewers are advised to ask.

Prepare it anyway, because it is the question the failed answers cluster around. Pick a real failure with a real cost, and be specific about the moment you knew. "We spent eleven thousand on a channel that produced four customers, and I knew by day nine and let it run to day thirty because I'd argued for it" is a better answer than any success story, provided you finish it with what you now do differently.

Reported by candidates at DeVry University and NEC Corporation of America, and at Research in Motion and Time Warner Cable in reports truncated in the original — the Time Warner Cable one recording that expectations were asked at the very beginning.

Come with a researched band and give it as a band. The number you say is the ceiling of the negotiation, so a number said nervously and too low is the most expensive sentence in the interview.

Two market notes that change the script depending on where you are sitting. In the EU, an employer may not ask you what you currently earn — the Pay Transparency Directive is explicit about pay history, and it also gives you a right to be told the pay or range for the job before the interview. Ask for it. Where no such rule binds the employer, expect the opposite: the expected-salary question arrives early and directly, and refusing to answer it reads as evasive rather than as good tactics.

If a marketing role is compensated like a sales role, the job is a sales job with a marketing title. Find out which before you answer.

Reported by candidates at Guaranteed Rate, and at PexSupply as "Why did you quit your former job?". Answer forward, not backward: what you want next, in one sentence, with no diagnosis of your last manager.

A candidate for a Digital Marketing Manager role at VF filed two reports in January 2011. One records the question "Whre are you from?" [sic]. The other records this, in full: "If you are married, what are you waiting to start having kids?"

In the EU, the UK and much of the US, that question is either unlawful or evidence in a discrimination claim, and it is not a grey area.

What to do in the room is a separate matter from what is legal, and anyone who tells you it is simple has not been in the room. The practical move is to answer the legitimate question underneath it and nothing else: "If you're asking about availability — I'm not planning any leave, and I'd give you plenty of notice if that changed." That is a complete answer, it closes the topic, and it does not concede the question.

Then decide something separate: whether you want to work there. A question like that is information about the employer, and it is more reliable information than anything on their careers page.

A Citadel Outlets report from March 2012 shows the milder version, and it is worth reading because the candidate's own annoyance survives in the record: asked which high school they had attended, they noted they had over six years of marketing experience and did not find the question professional. That is not unlawful. It is just a signal about how the role will be judged.

The form it arrives in is usually a round number and a blank sheet: how would you spend a million dollars on a new campaign?

The reflex answer is a channel list. A channel list is not a plan, and this question exists to find out whether you have one.

Do it in this order instead. Ask what the money is supposed to buy — trial, awareness, retention, a launch — because a million dollars for a launch and a million for retention are different plans. Split the money and say the split out loud: a majority into the one channel that already works for them, a slice into one thing you want to prove, and a reserve you do not allocate on day one. Then say what you would kill and when. "If the test channel isn't beating the blended cost per acquisition by week six, I stop it and the money goes back to the channel that works."

Committing to a split is the whole exercise. An answer that ends in "it depends on the data" is an answer that has not been given.

And if you don't know their numbers, invent them out loud. "I'm going to assume a customer is worth about three hundred dollars over a year — tell me if that's wildly wrong." Being corrected is fine. Being vague is not.

Reported by candidates at PepsiCo in a form that is hard to improve on: "How would you convince loyal Coke customers to switch to Pepsi?" A candidate at XM Satellite Radio Holdings reported a version about reaching a new segment, truncated in the original report.

The right first move is to refuse the premise politely. Loyal customers of an entrenched brand are usually the worst target you have, and saying so is a stronger answer than a clever campaign aimed at them. Go after the switchers, the lapsed, the occasion the incumbent does not own.

Then pick the wedge: a moment, not a demographic. People change brands when something else changes — they move house, the price gap widens, they have a child, the vending machine is empty.

Reported by candidates at S.C. Johnson: "Given the data, prepare a presentation in 10 minutes."

Lead with the finding, not the method. Ten minutes is enough for one headline, two supporting slides and an ask; it is not enough to walk the panel through your working. Say what you would do about it, and say what would change your mind.

A L'Oréal USA candidate reported that two new products were placed on the table, and that the task was to analyse them and describe why they fit with the specific brand each was identified with.

Positioning, out loud, under time pressure. Talk about who it is for and what it is instead of, and only then about the pack. Interviewers in consumer marketing are listening for whether you think about the shopper or about the design.

Ask what the link is supposed to do before you answer. Placement follows intent, and saying so is the part that is actually being scored.

These three are the same question wearing different clothes, and they are not a marketing test at all — they are a nerve test.

Reported by candidates at Red Ventures as "Estimate the number of windows in [a city]." and "How many carts can fill our building if the carts were 7x10." A candidate at Microsoft reported being asked the distance between two points; a FedEx report describes a fixed and variable cost question, truncated in the original.

Say the assumptions out loud, in round numbers, and keep the arithmetic simple enough to do in your head without stopping the conversation. "Call it a million people, roughly two and a half per household, so four hundred thousand homes, ten windows each…" The number does not matter. Nobody in the room knows how many windows are in that city. What is being measured is whether you freeze.

Reported by candidates at Georgia-Pacific Corporation in the blunt form "Have your worked on a business where advertising has positive ROI" [sic].

This is the question that sorts the profession, and the honest answer is often "not everywhere, and here is where it didn't."

Give one campaign with a real before and after. What the baseline was, what you changed, what it cost, what moved, and — the part that earns trust — what else was happening at the same time that might also explain it. Volunteering the confound is the single strongest move available to you here, because every experienced marketer knows the confound exists, and a candidate who does not name it looks either unaware of it or content to let it pass.

If your honest answer is that attribution at your last company was a mess, say that, and say what you did to get a cleaner read: a holdout region, a paused channel, a week dark.

A question from an employer-facing hiring template rather than a candidate report, which is worth flagging because it changes what it tells you: this is what interviewers are advised to ask, not something someone recorded being asked.

It is still a good trap. Name one metric you watch that does not flatter you — cost per acquisition after refunds, the share of revenue from customers who would have bought anyway, the unsubscribe rate on the campaign that hit its click target.

Reported by candidates at Direct Alliance, truncated in the original report at "What is the biggest advantage of PPC marketin…".

Speed of feedback, and say why that matters: you can be wrong on Monday and right by Friday, which is not true of a brand campaign. Then say the cost of that advantage — it optimises toward people who were already going to buy.

Reported by candidates at Express LLC, truncated in the original at "Can you tell me about an email program you ha…".

List size, segmentation, send cadence, and what you did about the people who never opened. The last one is the interesting part and almost nobody prepares it.

An Overstock.com candidate reported a question about a conversion metric where revenues were increasing, truncated in the original report. Know your own funnel arithmetic well enough to spot the trick: revenue can rise while conversion falls, and being able to say why in one sentence is the answer.

Reported by candidates at General Mills ("What Excel functions are you comfortable using?") and at iProspect, whose report about using Excel to analyse data was truncated in the original. Answer with a task, not a function list. "I rebuilt the weekly channel report as a pivot off the raw export so nobody was retyping it" beats naming five functions.

Both parts of this were reported by candidates at Mount Carmel Health. One report records the interviewer's framing directly: "We are not looking for technical people. that was a problem with our 'other resource.' But we need someone who can do site maps with a marketing sense. Can you do that or have you done that?" A second report from the same employer asks straight out whether the candidate can do print marketing as well as digital.

That first quote is worth reading twice, because it is a hiring manager telling you exactly what went wrong with the last person. When you get a sentence like that, the correct response is to answer the question underneath it. They are not asking whether you can draw a site map. They are asking whether you will disappear into tooling and stop thinking about the customer.

The answer that lands is a story where you chose the less technical option on purpose and it worked.

Reported by candidates at Adobe. A Maronda Homes report describes questions covering social media, print, web and travel in one sweep.

The weak answer lists platforms. The strong one names what you were responsible for — the calendar, the budget, the replies, the crisis — because "experience" here means ownership, and a CV can carry every platform name without carrying any of it.

A candidate at LCA reported being asked to provide amounts and budget examples of online media buying they had been involved with. Give the monthly figure, the platforms, and whether you had the login. Whether you had the login is the real question.

Reported by candidates at Trinchero Family Estates, and in a broader form at CareFirst as "How would you approach analyzing our customers and competitors".

Say what you would read, what you would buy, and what you would do that costs nothing — their careers page tells you what they are building, their review pages tell you what they break, their ad library tells you what they are currently claiming.