There’s a heated debate about the apparently short shelf-life and dwindling representation of chief marketing officers. The prevailing wisdom is that marketing leadership positions are shrinking in scope and lack endurance. Yet all this angst and ennui ignores a fundamental truth: CMOs have very different experiences depending on where they work, their company’s business model, and their gender.
To better understand CMO representation and tenure, Forrester analyzed the profiles of CMOs (both who carry that title or were otherwise the senior most marketing executive) within the Fortune 500. We found that 63% of Fortune 500 companies had a senior marketing executive that reported to the CEO and had responsibility for all of marketing; 55% had the CMO title; the average tenure was 4.2 years; and 53% are women. But these averages hide wide variations and distort arguments about the vitality of the CMO profession.
CMO representation varies significantly by industry and business model
Don’t be fooled by the averages: CMOs are very common in the financial services and utilities/telecommunications industries, but they’re a rare exception in other sectors like energy and mining. We saw a whopping 70% variance in CMO representation across the sectors we tracked.
Business model also has a major impact on the prevalence of CMOs: Over three-quarters of B2C-focused companies have a CMO, compared with less than half of B2B-focused companies, and B2B2C-focused companies fall in between at around two-thirds having a CMO.
The gender gap is real when it comes to CMO tenure
Summary statistics also fail to accurately capture the fortunes of Fortune 500 CMOs, especially their tenure: We saw a 75% variance in average CMO tenure across the industries we tracked. We saw similar disparities by business model too: B2B CMOs have the lowest average tenure and B2B2C CMOs the longest.
Women fare worse off than men — Female CMOs have a markedly lower tenure than their male counterparts, despite holding the majority of CMO positions in the Fortune 500 overall.
What should you take away from our analysis? When it comes to understanding the professional lives of CMOs, the devil is in the details. The popular gloom-and-doom narrative is far too simplistic and overstated. CMOs in financial services live in a different work world than their peers in energy and mining, and women have very different experiences than men. We should focus on these disparities and what’s behind them, rather than obsessing about meaningless global averages.
