7 Marketing Interview Questions and Answers

The goal is to understand how the candidate deals with negative press. Negative press is something any marketing strategy has to take into account and have a plan to deal with.

What to look for in an answer:

• Do they feel comfortable talking about the issue of negative attention?
• Are they able to produce a plan for converting negative attention to positive branding?
• Do they see a negative post as an opportunity rather than a setback?

Example: "I would take the opportunity as a representative of the brand to address the customer in a respectful and holistic way, assuring them that our brand feels accountable to making the customer happy and discussing how we can best accomplish that in the customer's future interactions with our brand."

The goal is to have the candidate discuss his process of creating and implementing a marketing plan.

What to look for in an answer:

• Do they have an answer ready to hand?
• Do they enjoy discussing the experience of deploying the strategy?
• Is the strategy they discuss a sound one?

Example: "I was charged with introducing a new brand at a tech conference in Las Vegas. We created a strategy that involved physical signage and giveaways at the conference center, along with a Twitter account that posted about the next locations where customers could find our product. We integrated the campaign with general conference tweets through the use of hashtags. It was a lot of fun."

The goal is to understand how the candidate quantifies success with data.

What to look for in an answer:

• Does the candidate point to ways of measuring customer awareness online and off?
• Do they demonstrate a good facility with metrics?
• Do they demonstrate interest in quantification and data?

Example: "Our team tracked mentions of our product throughout the conference to see how many conference attendees were engaging with the product. We also tracked hits to our website, as well as attendance at the giveaways. Other metrics we computed were sales after the conference, mentions on social media and engagement through other channels like email."

The question is designed to understand how the candidate deals with failure.

What to look for in an answer:

• Are they overly discouraged by failure?
• Are they able to learn from failure?
• How do they creatively implement these lessons?

Example: "A brand I marketed did not experience strong engagement online from customers. In research done after the campaign, we learned that our sense of who the customer was inaccurate, and the true customer should be targeted differently. We adjusted our marketing language and targeted differently via ads and outreach and experienced greater success the next time."

The goal is to find out how the candidate deals with people who work and believe differently than they do.

What to look for in an answer:

• Do they exhibit an ability to bridge differences?
• Are they open minded?
• Can they grapple with and manage disagreement?

Example: "I worked on a team with several people who came from very different backgrounds and disagreed on many things. The way I worked to bridge this gap was by defining what our product was together and focusing on the product rather than on our personal differences. By focusing that way, we were able to work together.