How Many People Does Marketing Actually Need? A Practising CMO Breaks It Down

When a marketing department asks for more headcount, the usual response is a counter-question: what will change? The answer tends to be vague, because the relationship between the number of people and results in marketing is more complex than in manufacturing or sales.

Oleksandr Rodkin, Chief Marketing Officer of an international holding company, has published three studies in peer-reviewed journals over the past year — and all three address the same underlying question: whether marketing output can grow without growing the team.

He is 27 years old, based in Alicante, and manages a department of 20.

Why the Link Between Headcount and Results Is Nonlinear

Marketing works in a way where each additional hire delivers less incremental gain than the one before. In sales, the relationship is more direct: ten account managers will handle roughly twice the volume of five.

In marketing, a new hire first adapts to the process, then coordinates with the existing team, then begins producing results — and by that point, some of the tasks they were hired for have already shifted.

Rodkin encountered this firsthand: his team of 20 handles workloads that at many companies require considerably larger staff. The difference is not about working harder. He documented it across three publications, each examining a separate layer of the problem.

What happens to performance marketing after automation

Rodkin's first of three publications appeared in October 2025 in the European Journal of Management, Economics and Business.

In it, he and his co-authors examined how automation based on large language models affects three performance marketing metrics: customer acquisition cost, return on marketing investment, and the speed of creative production.

The findings align with common sense: automation accelerates the creative production cycle and allows more variants to be tested in the same timeframe. Customer acquisition cost, however, depends on how the decision-making process is structured.

Automation without rethinking the process produces a short-lived effect, after which costs revert to their previous levels. Rodkin explains this by noting that the tool speeds up execution, but the choice of direction is still made by a person — and if that choice is slow, automation runs into it.

Shared knowledge base, AI copilots, and unfiltered ideas

The second publication — in the European Journal of Marketing and Management Sciences, May–June 2026 — examines how process design, AI copilots, and team flexibility affect marketing efficiency when department size is fixed.

Rodkin identifies three factors that reduce the need for hiring. The first is how ideas are collected and selected. On his team, any employee submits ideas without a filter; selection happens based on the cost of testing and on which decision the result would change.

The second is a centralised knowledge base available to the entire team: when accumulated experience is stored in one place, a new employee does not have to retrace the same path from scratch. The third is reallocating tasks within the existing team instead of hiring for every new project.

AI copilots in this setup function as amplifiers for specific operations: report preparation, initial data processing, text drafts. Rodkin draws a clear line between automating operations and automating decisions. An operation can be handed to a tool. A decision cannot, because accountability stays with the person.

Marketing That Reports Through P&L

The third publication appeared in the American Journal of Business Management in June 2026. Its subject is integrating marketing mix modeling (MMM), attribution, and AI-powered forecasting into a unified system for managing unit economics, profit-and-loss reporting, and plan-versus-actual analysis.

In practice, this means Rodkin's marketing department works with the same financial instruments as the rest of the business. Marketing reports in P&L terms — reach and clicks remain operational metrics but are not the language of the conversation with the business.

This changes the dialogue with the CFO: instead of 'we need a budget for a campaign,' it becomes 'here is a model showing where revenue gains are, and here is last quarter's plan-versus-actual.'

Rodkin notes that this shift — from marketing metrics to financial ones — directly affects the headcount question. When results are measured in money, the case for hiring is built differently.

Instead of 'we don't have enough hands,' it becomes 'here is a task that will generate this much, and it requires a person with this function.'

Three Peer-Reviewed Journals in One Year — A Rarity for a Practising CMO

In February 2026, Rodkin was granted Senior Member status in the E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Association (ECDMA), a professional body for e-commerce and digital marketing specialists.

The previous year, he served on the speaker selection committee for an international conference organised with the association's involvement.

Peer-reviewed articles are typically written by researchers; practitioners share their experience through trade media and conferences. Rodkin operates in both spaces. What makes his case notable is that all three papers describe processes he runs on a daily basis.

Why This Extends Beyond His Department

The question 'how many people does marketing need' comes up at every growing company, and the answer usually depends on the CMO's negotiating power. Rodkin proposes removing negotiation from the equation and replacing it with calculation.

Once marketing learns to speak the language of P&L, the need for a separate justification disappears: the financial model itself shows where revenue is added and where spending yields no return.

Departments like his are still few. Most marketing teams continue to grow alongside their task lists, and every budgeting cycle turns into a negotiation.

Rodkin's published work describes a concrete mechanism for breaking out of that cycle — and the fact that the mechanism already operates in a functioning department of twenty makes his arguments verifiable.