Marketing Leadership Lessons for Small Business Growth

A fast-food chain creating two senior marketing roles might sound like “big brand stuff” that doesn’t apply to a UK small business. I disagree.

Wingstop UK has just appointed former Wagamama CMO Emma Colquhoun as its new chief growth officer, while its existing CMO Dirujan Sabesan becomes chief brand officer. That split—growth on one side, brand on the other—isn’t corporate theatre. It’s a very practical answer to a problem most SMEs feel every week: Should we chase quick sales, or invest in a brand people remember?

January is when many small businesses reset targets, budgets, and marketing plans. It’s also when “growth” gets treated like a channel problem (more ads, more posts, more emails). The reality? Growth usually improves when someone owns the job of aligning brand, customer experience, and performance marketing into one clear system.

What Wingstop’s new marketing roles really signal

Answer first: Wingstop’s reshuffle says the company believes growth won’t come from more activity—it’ll come from clear ownership of two different (but connected) jobs: building demand (brand) and capturing demand (growth).

Wingstop UK has created two new leadership positions to steer marketing:

• Chief growth officer (CGO): Emma Colquhoun, formerly Wagamama’s chief marketing and commercial officer, plus a long stint at Krispy Kreme and earlier experience at Ferrero.
• Chief brand officer (CBO): Dirujan Sabesan, Wingstop UK’s first CMO (appointed Nov 2024), now focused on ensuring “creativity and culture are genuine growth drivers”.

Wingstop has been in the UK since 2018, has grown to around 60 stores, and was bought out by Sixth Street last year. This is a business under pressure to keep expanding—but also to stay culturally relevant, particularly with younger audiences.

For small businesses, the headline isn’t “new exec appointment.” The headline is: they’ve separated brand building from growth execution so neither gets neglected.

The small business translation

You don’t need two chiefs. But you do need two jobs covered:

1. Brand job: clarity, distinctiveness, reputation, creative consistency.
2. Growth job: leads, bookings, online sales, conversion rate, retention.

If one person is doing both (often the owner), the risk is predictable: you get stuck in constant promotion mode, and your brand becomes “whoever has a discount this week.”

Chief growth vs chief brand: the split most SMEs should copy

Answer first: If you want sustainable growth in digital marketing, separate strategy and creative consistency from weekly acquisition and conversion work—even if it’s the same person wearing two hats.

When Sabesan moves from CMO to chief brand officer, Wingstop is effectively stating: brand isn’t “the nice-to-have bit.” Brand is part of the growth engine.

For a local service business—say a plumber in Leeds, a Pilates studio in Bristol, or an independent café in Manchester—this split looks like:

• Brand ownership
  • Your positioning: who you’re for and why you’re different
  • Your tone of voice on social
  • Your Google Business Profile photos, reviews, and responses
  • Your website messaging and offers (the words on the page matter)
• Growth ownership
  • Your lead tracking (calls, forms, DMs)
  • Your Google Ads / Meta Ads structure
  • Your landing pages and conversion improvements
  • Your email/SMS follow-up and repeat purchase system

Here’s the stance: Most small businesses don’t have a traffic problem. They have a clarity and conversion problem. Brand fixes clarity; growth fixes conversion.

A simple “two-hat” operating model

If you’re the owner and you’re time-poor, run marketing in two weekly blocks:

• 60–90 minutes “Brand Block” (once a week)
  • Review your top 3 messages (homepage, bio, pinned post)
  • Collect proof (reviews, testimonials, photos, before/after)
  • Plan one strong piece of content that reflects your values and expertise
• 60–90 minutes “Growth Block” (once a week)
  • Check lead sources and costs
  • Improve one conversion point (CTA, booking flow, enquiry form)
  • Follow up warm leads (email, call, DM)

It’s not glamorous, but it’s what stops you from marketing like a panic response.

Why cross-industry marketing hires matter (and how SMEs can mimic it)

Answer first: Hiring (or borrowing) experience from other categories works because it brings fresh pattern recognition—and SMEs can get the same benefit without a big salary.

Colquhoun’s background spans Wagamama, Krispy Kreme, and Ferrero. Those brands operate in different corners of food/retail, but they share core growth realities:

• High competition
• Habit-driven repeat purchases
• Strong role for brand cues (packaging, store experience, social identity)

Small businesses can copy the principle by bringing in outside perspective in low-cost ways:

1. Monthly “marketing surgery” with a specialist
   • One hour with a freelance PPC, SEO, or social lead can save months of trial and error.
2. Advisory swap with another local business
   • A gym owner and a café owner often have more useful insight for each other than they expect.
3. Borrow frameworks, not tactics
   • Big brands test relentlessly. You can too—just on a smaller scale.

A practical example: if you run a local restaurant, you can borrow a retail mindset:

• Treat your Google reviews like product ratings.
• Treat your menu photos like ecommerce product imagery.
• Treat your booking journey like checkout.

That’s “cross-industry thinking” without the org chart.

Digital marketing moves Wingstop’s strategy hints at (and SMEs can apply)

Answer first: If Wingstop is banking on youth culture and creativity to drive growth, SMEs should prioritise distinctive content + conversion basics over constant posting.

Wingstop has been described as particularly strong at tapping into youth culture, and staying true to that audience while scaling. Whether you’re targeting students, young professionals, families, or B2B buyers, the lesson is the same: pick a core audience and build recognisable signals for them.

1) Build a “core audience” before you broaden

If your marketing tries to appeal to everyone in your town, it’ll resonate with nobody.

Do this instead:

• Choose one primary segment (e.g., “busy parents who need dinner fast” or “office teams ordering lunch”).
• Create 3–5 recurring content themes for that segment.
• Make your offers specific (family bundle, office catering pack, midweek set menu).

You’ll still get other customers, but your marketing will finally feel coherent.

2) Make creativity do a job (not win awards)

Sabesan’s remit explicitly ties creativity and culture to growth. For SMEs, that means: creative choices must support an outcome.

Examples of “creative that converts” for small business digital marketing:

• A 15-second “behind the scenes” reel that proves quality (reduces price resistance)
• A consistent visual style that makes your posts instantly recognisable
• A simple, bold promise on your homepage that tells people they’re in the right place

Creativity isn’t decoration. It’s decision-making support.

3) Get ruthless about conversion basics

Before you spend more on ads, fix the stuff that leaks leads:

• Your website should answer in 5 seconds: what you do, who it’s for, and how to buy/book.
• Your Google Business Profile should have: correct categories, services, opening hours, strong photos, and regular updates.
• Your enquiry process should have: instant confirmation + a clear next step.

A good rule: If a customer has to think, you lose them.

4) Track one growth metric and one brand metric

Big brands use brand tracking studies; you don’t need that. But you do need signals.

Pick:

• Growth metric: leads per week, cost per lead, conversion rate, repeat bookings
• Brand metric: review velocity (new reviews/month), branded search uplift, direct traffic, social saves/shares

If your growth metric improves while your brand metric collapses, you’re buying short-term demand at the expense of reputation.

People Also Ask: leadership and growth for small business marketing

Do I need a “chief growth officer” for my small business?

No. But you do need someone accountable for growth outcomes (leads, sales, retention) and someone accountable for brand consistency. That can be you + a freelancer, or two internal roles, or simply two blocks of time.

What’s the quickest way to see growth from digital marketing?

Fix conversion first: messaging clarity, booking flow, follow-up speed, and proof (reviews/case studies). Then scale traffic through SEO and paid.

How do I balance brand building and lead generation?

Run both every week: one activity that builds long-term demand (content, reviews, community, PR) and one that captures demand (ads, local SEO, email follow-up).

A practical January action plan (copy/paste)

Answer first: If you do these five things in the next 14 days, your small business marketing will be clearer, more measurable, and easier to scale.

1. Write your one-sentence positioning
   • “We help [specific people] get [specific result] without [common pain].”
2. Audit your Google Business Profile
   • Categories, services, photos, and a review response template.
3. Pick one core audience
   • Decide who you’re primarily speaking to for Q1.
4. Choose one acquisition channel to focus
   • Local SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads, or partnerships—one, not four.
5. Install simple tracking
   • A lead spreadsheet is fine. What matters is consistency.

If you want a sixth step: stop creating content that doesn’t have a next action.

What to take from Wingstop’s move this week

Wingstop’s appointment of a chief growth officer alongside a chief brand officer is a reminder that marketing leadership is often about focus, not flash. They’re making sure growth and brand don’t compete for attention—they’re designed to reinforce each other.

For the “British Small Business Digital Marketing” series, this is the thread worth pulling: your marketing plan doesn’t need to be bigger, it needs to be owned. Assign brand ownership. Assign growth ownership. Put numbers beside both.

If you made one change this month—what would happen if you treated your brand as the thing that makes lead generation cheaper, rather than the thing you work on “when you’ve got time”?