We were conducting interviews for a new marketing position in our company. My co-founder and I previously did the marketing work on the side but since our workload is increasing we decided to hire someone new for this. Since we are going to have a dedicated marketing person and don't have any specialized knowledge about marketing we asked questions like:
Suppose we have this Product X for target audience Y, what will be your strategy to increase sales?
However, in this question the author felt that it may be inappropriate to ask this type of question. We are not looking for candidates to divulge business secrets, we just want to be convinced from their answers that we're hiring the right candidate.
Will it be appropriate to ask this question?