The Hire: Setting Up Your AI Marketing Executive

This is Part 1 of a 16-part series on building your AI VP of Marketing with Claude Cowork. Next: The First Assignment: Building Your Marketing Strategy

Why an AI VP of Marketing

You are spending your evenings writing Instagram captions, your weekends wrestling with email automation, and your mornings wondering if any of it moves the needle. Marketing keeps falling to you because a real VP costs six figures and your business is not there yet. So the work gets done in the gaps -- without strategy, without positioning, without anyone whose job is to think about the big picture.

A chatbot does not fix that. Ask it to "write a social media post about our new product" and you get a post. Fine. But a VP thinks about questions you have not asked yet -- tells you to drop Twitter and double down on LinkedIn because that is where your buyers are, notices your email open rates slipping before you check the dashboard, remembers that your last launch flopped because you announced it on a Friday afternoon. This series gives you that VP, built on Claude Cowork, running on your desktop, working from a brief you write together.

What is Claude Cowork?

Claude Cowork is a desktop application from Anthropic -- not a chatbot, not a browser tab you close and forget. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude.ai, where conversations fade from memory, Cowork lets you create a Project with persistent instructions that carry across days and weeks. Your AI VP does not forget your brand voice between Tuesday and Thursday.

Cowork can also work autonomously. Hand it a task, step away, come back to finished work. That matters for marketing, where the job is often "produce five variations of this email subject line" or "draft next week's social calendar" -- tasks that benefit from a clear brief and uninterrupted execution time.

What You Will Build

Sixteen articles, zero to a working AI marketing operation. You do not need to finish all 16 -- there are three natural stopping points, each one genuinely useful on its own.

Off-ramp 1 -- Article 4: A Working VP with Context and Standards Your AI VP knows your business, your voice, your audience, and your content standards. You can hand it any marketing task and get back work that sounds like you. For many small businesses, this is enough.

Off-ramp 2 -- Article 10: A Full Content Marketing Pipeline Your VP produces blog posts, email sequences, social media content, and landing page copy on a repeatable schedule. You have templates, workflows, and a content calendar. This is a serious marketing operation.

Off-ramp 3 -- Article 13: Pipeline Plus Measurement Everything from off-ramp 2, plus a framework for tracking what works. Your VP helps you measure results, adjust strategy, and connect marketing activity to actual business outcomes.

Articles 14-16 extend the system into sales enablement and advanced automation. The full series covers:

1. The Hire (you are here) -- Project setup and business onboarding
2. The First Assignment -- Marketing strategy and Memory
3. You're Still the Boss -- Human accountability for AI outputs
4. Writing the Playbook -- Codifying your marketing standards with Rules
5. Skill: Content Brief Generator -- Your first reusable Skill
6. Skill: Brand Voice Checker -- Automated voice consistency
7. Meet Your Agents -- Understanding Cowork's autonomous workers
8. Agent: Campaign Strategist -- Turning briefs into campaign plans
9. Agent: Content Repurposer -- One piece, multiple formats
10. Wiring It Together -- Your first marketing pipeline
11. Skill: Social Media Post Creator -- Platform-specific content
12. Agent: Channel Distribution Planner -- Cross-channel scheduling
13. Measuring What Matters -- Tracking your AI VP's impact
14. Running on Autopilot -- Automating recurring work with Scheduled Tasks
15. Expanding the Role -- Adding sales support
16. The Full Executive -- Your complete AI marketing system

Prerequisites: a Claude Cowork subscription and a business to market. If you can describe what you sell and who buys it, you have everything you need.

Create Your Cowork Project

Open Claude Cowork. From the home screen, click New Project. The Project you create here is where everything in this series will live.

Give your project a name. "Marketing VP" works. So does your company name followed by "Marketing." The name is for you -- pick something you will recognize when you have multiple projects open.

You should see an empty project workspace. There are no files, no instructions, no conversation history. This is day one. Your VP just walked into an empty office with a blank whiteboard and no context about the company.

That is all the setup you need for now. You have an empty office. Next, you fill it with everything your new VP needs to know about your business.

The Onboarding Interview

Every good hire starts with onboarding. Your VP needs to understand your business before they can market it. Instead of writing a brief from scratch, you are going to let your VP interview you.

The process works like this: you paste a prompt into Cowork, and your VP asks you a series of questions about your business. You answer each one. At the end, the VP compiles your answers into a structured briefing document called CLAUDE.md. This document becomes the foundation for everything that follows.

Copy the following prompt and paste it into your new Cowork project:

You are my new VP of Marketing. Before you do any work, you need to understand my business. Interview me to build your briefing document.

Ask me the following questions ONE AT A TIME. Wait for my answer before moving to the next question. Be conversational -- if my answer is vague, ask a follow-up to get specifics.

Questions to cover:
1. What is the name of your business?
2. What do you sell or offer? (Be specific -- not just "consulting" but what kind and for whom)
3. Who is your ideal customer? (Demographics, role, industry, company size -- whatever applies)
4. How would you describe your brand personality in 3-5 adjectives? (If you are not sure, describe how you want customers to feel when they interact with your brand)
5. What makes you different from competitors? Why do customers choose you over alternatives?
6. What are your top 3 marketing goals right now? (Examples: more leads, higher website traffic, better email engagement, launch a new product)
7. What marketing channels are we currently using, if any? (Social media, email, blog, ads, word of mouth, etc.)
8. What is working? What is not?

After I have answered every question, move through the four phases below in strict order.

PHASE 1 -- ANNOUNCE FILES
Before you draft anything, name the files and stores you plan to touch.
Name the CLAUDE.md path at the Project root, plus any Memory entries you plan to add.
Do not write a single byte until I have seen this list and said to proceed.

PHASE 2 -- PAUSE FOR WRITES
Draft the full CLAUDE.md in the conversation using clear markdown headers for each required section.
Include Business Overview, Target Audience, Brand Voice, Value Proposition, Marketing Goals, and Current Channels.
Start the draft with this heading line: # Marketing VP -- [Company Name].
Follow it with: This is the operating brief for all marketing work in this project.
Show me the complete draft and then stop and wait for my review.

PHASE 3 -- COMMIT ON APPROVAL
Do not save the CLAUDE.md to the Project until I reply with a clear yes.
If I request changes, revise the draft and show it again before saving.
The only trigger for a write is my explicit approval in this chat.

PHASE 4 -- CLOSE WITH LOCATION
Once the save is complete, confirm the write back to me in one short line.
Use this exact phrasing: here is where it lives: ./CLAUDE.md at the Project root.
If the save failed or landed elsewhere, tell me that instead of guessing.

Begin the interview now with question one.

After PHASE 4 confirms the write, your Project folder surfaces exactly one file at the root:

your-cowork-project/
└── CLAUDE.md

Your new Cowork Project surfaces -- a single folder with CLAUDE.md sitting at the root.

When you paste this in, Cowork starts asking you questions. Answer them honestly and specifically. "We sell software" is less useful than "we sell inventory management software for independent bookstores." The more specific you are, the better your VP performs on every task that follows.

Some tips for the interview:

On brand personality: if you struggle with adjectives, think about a real interaction you had with a happy customer. How did that conversation feel? Warm and casual? Direct and efficient? Playful? Those feelings are your brand voice.

On marketing goals: be honest about where you are. "I want more leads" is fine. "I want to go viral" is not a goal -- it is a wish. Good goals are things you can measure: more email subscribers, more website visitors from search, more demo requests.

On what is working: if you have no idea, say so. "I post on Instagram twice a week and I have no idea if it does anything" is useful information. Your VP needs to know what to keep, what to fix, and what to stop.

The interview takes five to ten minutes. At the end, Cowork produces a structured document covering your business, your audience, your voice, and your goals.

Here is what a finished CLAUDE.md might look like for a fictional business:

# Marketing VP -- Tideway Bookkeeping

This is the operating brief for all marketing work in this project.

## Business Overview
Tideway Bookkeeping provides cloud-based bookkeeping services for freelancers
and solo consultants. Founded in 2024, based in Vancouver. Clients pay a flat
monthly fee for categorized transactions, monthly reports, and tax-ready files.

## Target Audience
Freelance designers, developers, writers, and consultants earning $75K-$250K
annually. They are skilled at their craft but overwhelmed by financial admin.
Most are 28-45, work remotely, and have tried doing their own books before
giving up.

## Brand Voice
Adjectives: friendly, plain-spoken, reassuring, efficient.
Tideway sounds like a smart friend who happens to be great with numbers. No
jargon, no condescension. We explain things in plain language and never make
clients feel dumb for not knowing accounting terminology.

## Value Proposition
Flat-rate pricing with no surprises. Most bookkeeping services charge by the
hour or by transaction volume, which means freelancers with irregular income
never know what they will pay. Tideway charges one price regardless of volume.

## Marketing Goals
1. Grow email list from 400 to 2,000 subscribers by Q4
2. Publish 2 blog posts per month targeting "freelance bookkeeping" keywords
3. Launch a referral program that generates 10 new clients per month

## Current Channels
- Blog (2 posts/month, decent search traffic, best-performing channel)
- Instagram (posting 3x/week, low engagement, unclear ROI)
- Email newsletter (monthly, 38% open rate, small list)
- Word of mouth (strongest source of new clients, but unpredictable)

Your version will look different. The structure matters more than the length. Every section gives your VP something to work with when you start assigning real tasks.

Once you are satisfied with the briefing document, save it. Your VP is onboarded.

Where Everything Lives

Before you paste anything in, it helps to know what a Cowork Project actually contains. Your VP does not float in the void -- the Project is the office, and a few labelled folders on the wall are where the company handbook, the filing cabinet, and the house rules live.

A Project is the top-level container for everything your VP needs: the instructions you write, the memory Cowork keeps, and the conversation history that accumulates as you work. Every surface you will touch in this series lives inside one Project, and nothing inside a Project leaks to any other Project you create.

• CLAUDE.md -- the briefing document you author. It is the Anthropic-standard filename for project-level instructions, and Cowork loads it automatically at the start of every conversation. You write it; you edit it; you own it.
• Memory -- the running record of what your VP has learned about your business. Cowork manages this surface for you, summarizing prior conversations and exposing them in the Project sidebar so you do not have to re-explain a decision you already made.
• Rules files -- optional, modular instructions you author for specific situations (a voice rule, a publishing checklist, a brand-safety guardrail). You write them; Cowork loads the ones that apply when they apply.

The shorthand is simple: Project metadata and Memory are Cowork's job, CLAUDE.md and Rules are yours. Treat the Project as your VP's office and treat these files as the documents on the desk.

What just changed

You wrote your first ./CLAUDE.md and approved the save into your Cowork Project root. Cowork now loads that file on every turn, so company context arrives before your prompt.

What is Next

Your VP knows the basics. They can tell you who your customers are, what your brand sounds like, and what you are trying to accomplish. That is a foundation, not a strategy. Right now, your VP could write you a decent social media post. But they could not tell you whether social media is where you should be spending your time at all. They could draft an email, but they could not tell you whether email is where your audience actually pays attention.

In Article 2, you deepen the brief with competitive context and market positioning. You will tell your VP who your competitors are, what your market looks like, and where the gaps are. Then you give them their first real assignment: a complete marketing strategy that ties your goals to specific channels, content types, and timelines. You will also meet Memory -- the feature that lets your VP learn and retain strategic decisions across sessions, so you never have to re-explain a decision you already made. The briefing document becomes a strategic playbook.

This is Part 1 of 16 in the Your AI VP of Marketing series. Next: The First Assignment