Branding

Big Brand or Scale-up: How to Choose the Marketing Role That’s Right for You

Kerttu Inkeroinen, Chief Marketing Officer at Lucky Saint
Key points Kerttu Inkeroinen is CMO of Lucky Saint, and brings nearly 20 years of FMCG experience across brands including Coca-Cola and Kimberly-Clark, alongside more recent scale-up roles at Union Coffee and now Lucky Saint. She was named by Forbes as one of the top 50 most entrepreneurial CEOs and CMOs in the world. This […]

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Key points

  • Big brand vs. scale-up isn’t really the right question, Kerttu argues. What matters more is the specific challenge, the category, and what stage of your career and life you’re in
  • Both are reversible decisions, not permanent ones. You can move between the two more than once in a long career
  • Big organisations offer structure, scale, and access to specialists and top agencies. Scale-ups offer breadth: you’ll likely run far more of the business than your job title suggests
  • Before joining a scale-up, dig into the founder and leadership dynamics, not just the financials, they matter more at smaller scale than almost anywhere else
  • On imposter syndrome (which 51% of the TMM community self-reported in their upcoming State of Marketers report): ask who else in the room would genuinely do the role better, and consider what you’d regret more, trying and getting it wrong, or never trying at all
  • Career advice for people changing role or industry: focus on transferable attitude and mindset, not just direct experience, and don’t undersell your own value in a title or salary negotiation
  • Her closing advice: try more things without overthinking it, build a genuine support network, and check in with yourself yearly on what would make it a good year, not just what title you’re chasing

Table of Contents

Kerttu Inkeroinen is CMO of Lucky Saint, and brings nearly 20 years of FMCG experience across brands including Coca-Cola and Kimberly-Clark, alongside more recent scale-up roles at Union Coffee and now Lucky Saint. She was named by Forbes as one of the top 50 most entrepreneurial CEOs and CMOs in the world. This session ran as a community Q&A, so questions below are shared without names, as requested on the day.

Big brand or scale-up isn’t really the choice

Kerttu’s first instinct, when asked to contrast big corporates and scale-ups, was to push back on the framing itself. Even within a large organisation, roles and brand cultures vary hugely, her time on Kimberly-Clark’s Andrex and Huggies brands (commercial, sales-adjacent, cross-functional) looked nothing like her time on Coca-Cola’s brand side (long-term brand building, thinking in terms of decades, not quarters).

“It’s not actually just big corporate versus scale-up, because in big corporates you’ve also got a lot of different roles and brands and different style of businesses within them.”

The better question, in her view, is about the challenge itself: is the category growing or declining, is the brand pivoting or scaling, and what do you personally want to learn in the next two to five years. She also pointed out something easy to forget when a career move feels enormous: “our careers are very long”, and most of these decisions are reversible.

What to ask before joining a scale-up

Beyond the standard financial due diligence, Kerttu’s checklist for evaluating a scale-up role includes:

  • Whether the category itself is growing, static, or declining
  • Whether the role aligns with your own sense of purpose, she described a formative trip to Rwanda while at Union Coffee, seeing directly how her work affected coffee producers’ lives
  • What kind of challenge the business is actually solving (reversing a decline versus driving rapid growth are very different jobs)
  • The founder and leadership dynamics specifically, more than in bigger organisations, chemistry with the people at the top matters enormously at small scale
  • How the founder responds to being asked, in the interview itself, about their own biggest mistake in the past year

She also flagged that having someone in the business (even outside marketing) who speaks the same language as you, a marketing-literate chair or investor, made a real difference to her at Union Coffee.

Structure versus scale, and what each side offers

Large organisations bring things you only notice once you no longer have them: clear processes, defined roles, and access to specialists, the best agencies, and a peer group inside the same building. In a scale-up, you often become “the only person in the top table with marketing experience”, which is exactly why external networks (including communities like TMM) matter more, not less.

What scale-ups offer instead is breadth. Kerttu described taking on e-commerce, product innovation, customer service and a full rebrand at Union Coffee, work that would have sat with several separate specialist teams at a larger company.

“Your breadth of experience was so much larger, versus going deeper in the expertise.”

On imposter syndrome

Asked how to get past imposter syndrome when considering a step up (framed against TMM’s own research showing 51% of the community self-report experiencing it), Kerttu offered two practical reframes. First: ask who else in the organisation would genuinely be better suited to the role than you. Second, and the one she called on personally: think long-term. On your deathbed, you won’t regret putting yourself forward and making a mistake you learned from. You’ll regret never trying at all.

“You’re never going to regret that. You are going to regret the fact that you didn’t go and do it.”

Getting past CV screening when changing role or industry

For anyone shifting roles or industries and struggling to get past initial screening, Kerttu’s advice centres on showcasing transferable attitude rather than direct experience alone; she gave her own example of talking about a side business she’d founded, entirely absent from her CV, as evidence of entrepreneurial mindset when moving from a large FMCG business into a scale-up. Her broader point: most hiring managers believe skills can be taught, but attitude and growth mindset are harder to fake and worth foregrounding.

On networking specifically for early-career applicants without an existing network: reaching out directly to hiring managers on LinkedIn is never viewed badly, even if it goes unanswered, and building genuine relationships (not transactional ones) pays off later in ways that are hard to predict upfront.

On titles, and feeling stuck

Asked about feeling stuck below your capability, Kerttu suggested reframing the question away from title entirely: what specific capabilities do you feel you’re not currently using, and can that become a direct conversation with your manager rather than a vague sense of being under-levelled. She was candid about her own experience of status attached to working somewhere recognisable (“everybody in the world will know… that’s impressive”) versus the anonymity of an early-stage scale-up, and the value of deciding consciously whether title matters to you long-term, rather than getting stuck chasing it by default.

On negotiating compensation

Her practical advice: go into any process at a number you’d genuinely be happy with and wouldn’t resent later, rather than undercutting yourself from the start hoping to negotiate up. Once you’re a strong candidate deep into a process, there’s usually room to discuss bonuses, equity, or other adjustments, but that’s a much easier conversation once you’ve already demonstrated your value.

Closing advice

Kerttu’s three closing points: don’t let overthinking paralyse you from trying new things, since a long career gives you room to course-correct; deliberately build a support network in good times, not just when you need it; and check in with yourself yearly on what would actually make it a good year, rather than drifting toward the next title by default.