Help wanted: Wal-Mart hiring marketers

According to this article in Ad Age, Wal-Mart is dramatically increasing the size of their marketing staff.

Today Wal-Mart’s CMO, John Fleming, oversees a staff of 200 and a budget nearing the $1 billion mark, and, in unprecedented hiring spree, he plans to grow the marketing team as much as 30% this year, adding up to 60 people. In doing so, he’s looking to build from scratch three new departments -- brand management, a category marketing group and an insight and customer strategy group.

Side note: A billion for marketing is about 0.3% of sales.

The hiring seems to be a response to Target, which has about 1/6 the sales and 900 marketing employees (and whose stock price is doing better than Wal-Mart's).

Not everybody is happy with the changes:

One former insider lamented: “Why do you need all these people? You are going to start doing what everyone else does and pretty soon you are just going to be a worse Target, not a better Wal-Mart.”