Marketing Consultant
Help define how a new category of immersive experience reaches its two distinct audiences — and shape the strategy that the in-house team executes.
About Three Doors
Three Doors is a pre-launch immersive entertainment company. We're building a 90-minute live experience for teams of 3–6 where every player walks out with a behavioural profile derived from how they actually moved through pressure — not from a questionnaire. Two audiences, one product: consumer tickets for friends, couples and groups; corporate team-development packages on weekdays.
The founder is Tom Ball, who built DeskLodge (48,000 sq ft, £4m turnover, Sunday Times Top 10 Best Places to Work 2023, B-Corp) and has played 121 escape rooms in service of this.
We are pre-seed. Small team, AI-leveraged: a couple of full-time hires (Game Master, Operations Manager) plus a small consultant pool. This is a senior strategy seat in that pool.
The role
You shape the marketing strategy and we execute it. You bring senior-CMO judgement to a pre-launch business that genuinely sits between categories — not theatre, not escape room, not L&D assessment, not team-building — and help us land both consumer and corporate audiences from a standing start.
Hands-on consulting, not deck-handing. You'll be in the room (or on the call) regularly with Tom, you'll do customer-discovery work yourself, and you'll write the strategic spine the rest of the marketing function executes against.
Deliverables
The initial paid project is 20 days. That's enough for meaningful strategic work — not enough for 12 months of execution. We'd agree the subset of the list below to tackle in those 20 days at engagement start, biased toward the items that unblock the most downstream work.
The full scope this role might cover over time:
- Category positioning. A defendable answer to "what is this and what isn't it" — the language, the comparators, the differentiator hierarchy
- Two-audience strategy. How we reach consumer ticket-buyers and corporate L&D buyers with one product. Where they overlap, where they don't, what we say to each
- Channel prioritisation. What we test first, what we ignore, what the sequence of bets looks like across the next 12 months
- Brand voice + anchor copy. Voice guidelines and a first wave of public-facing copy — website spine, ads, waitlist nurture sequence, corporate first-meeting deck
- Customer-discovery cadence. Interview frame, target segments, the rhythm by which insight gets back into the product team
- Measurement. What we track, what we don't, how we tell signal from noise at low volumes
Exact mix flexes against what we already have and what's missing.
Who you are
- You've been a senior marketer or CMO (in-house or fractional) for at least one consumer-facing experience, attraction, hospitality, or live-event business — or for a B2B product where you owned both demand and content
- You've created or repositioned a category before — not just run growth inside an existing one
- You write. Plain, confident, no agency veneer. You can produce the first draft yourself
- Numerate. You read cohorts, design tests, and tell us when the data isn't saying what we'd like it to say
- Comfortable hand-off — the strategy you write will be executed by an in-house Ops Manager and a separate social-content consultant, not by you. You enable, you don't gate-keep
Bonus
- Background in immersive entertainment, escape rooms, theatre, attractions, hospitality, or experiential
- L&D / corporate-buyer experience (we have a separate L&D consultant too, but a marketer who already speaks the language compounds)
- Existing fractional/consulting practice — we're not your first client, we won't be your last
How we work
- AI-leveraged. We use Claude/ChatGPT extensively and expect you do too
- Pre-venue. Strategy is being built against a product that is still being built. Comfort with that ambiguity is part of the job
- Cockroach, not unicorn. We optimise for surviving long enough to learn, not for looking impressive
- Bias to operating discipline over startup-theatre. Tom's background is operational real estate, not VC-circuit
Terms
Initial scope, with view to more. This is an initial paid project — 20 days, tight scope, designed to land value fast. If it works for both sides, there's a lot more — extended consulting, project-by-project follow-on work, and potentially a full-time CMO seat as the business funds and scales. Several of the consultant briefs in this pool exist because the right initial engagement could grow into something bigger.
What we're imagining: 20 days total, drawn down over roughly 3–4 months. Day rate and fee structure discussed directly.
What we'd like to see: your proposal. If you'd rather fix it as a project fee, anchor on milestones, or shape it differently, show us how you'd structure it.
- Small advisory option grant available for the right candidate if the relationship extends (discuss)
- Mostly remote, with periodic days at our Henley HQ (Unit 1 Stuart's Lane, RG9 1RY) for working sessions and trial-session observation
- Standard consulting terms — your fee covers IP assignment on deliverables, you retain methodology
How to apply
Tell us, in your own words: (1) a category creation or repositioning you've led and what you did when the first version of the positioning didn't land, (2) one piece of strategic work you're proud of (link, deck, or write-up is fine), (3) one question you'd want to ask Tom before deciding.
Three Doors Experience Ltd is an equal-opportunity employer. We hire on judgement, behaviour under pressure, and whether you'll make the team better — not on credentials.