The CMO role has seen its fair proportion of change over the previous couple of years. From tightening budgets to uncertainty around the impacts of recent tech like artificial intelligence and a mean tenure amongst the execs of only 4.1 years, it’s fair to wonder what is in store for the way forward for the position. A recent report from Forrester found that the state of the CMO title largely relies on the industry and business model.
“The devil is in the details with this data,” said Ian Bruce, vp and principal analyst at Forrester. “I might say that the stats suggest that in lots of industries, CMOs are thoroughly represented and are doing thoroughly. In other industries, they’re faring worse.”
“The Representation and Tenure of Fortune 500 CMOs in 2024” report gathered data from December 2023 to March 2024 from Fortune 500 firms at the time data was collected. Additional data was sourced through company web sites, LinkedIn pages, financial reports and other public sources.
Representation varies
While the CMO role is alive and well, the profile and visibility of the role is essentially depending on industry and business model. For example, 91% of monetary services and insurance firms have a CMO or other marketing executive leader, while just 21% of energy and mining firms can say the same. However, the data found that the CMO is a more common position than not. Of the nine categories analyzed in the report, seven had a CMO rate of over 50%.
“Whether or not an organization has a CMO could be very, very depending on the industry you are in,” Bruce said. “In some industries, it’s normal, it’s just how the industry works.”
Business model has also proven to be a vital factor. While 63% of all Fortune 500 firms have a CMO or other marketing executive leader on their senior management team who reports to the CEO, there are disparities. Eighty-four percent of B2C firms have a CMO or other marketing executive leader, in comparison with 66% of firms with a mixed business model (B2B2C) with the position. Only 48% of B2B firms had a CMO role or equivalent.
What it takes to remain
Notably, women now make up the majority of executive marketing leaders in six of the nine Fortune 500 industries, including utilities and telecommunications (71%), healthcare (64%), financial services and insurance (56%), high-tech manufacturing (55%) primary goods manufacturing and pharma (53%) and retail and wholesale (51%). The categories where women don’t make up the majority of executive marketing leaders include business services and transportation (44%), energy and mining (36%) and media, entertainment, leisure and hospitality (33%).
This trend can also be stable across business models. Fifty-nine percent of B2B2C CMOs or executive marketing leaders at Fortune 500 firms are women, together with 51% at B2B firms and 50% at B2C firms. However, disparities between the two are evident. Men in senior marketing leadership roles are inclined to have longer tenures, with a mean length of 4.3 years, versus a mean of three.8 years for girls.
Disparities in tenure length exist across industries to various extents. Utilities and communications have a major gap, with the average tenure for men being 5.5 years while for girls it is simply 3.4 years. Some gaps in tenure are much closer, notably inside the primary goods manufacturing and pharma sectors, where the average for men and girls is 4.1 years and three.6 years, respectively.
However, women do take the lead in some industries. For example, in business services and transportation, the average tenure for girls is 3.4 years, in comparison with 3.2 years for men. Women also stay in high-tech manufacturing roles (4.2 years versus 3.8 years) and healthcare roles (4.3 years versus 3.9 years) longer than men.
“Where representation is high, tenure gets long, where representation is low, tenure goes down as well,” said Bruce. “These things correlate, which makes logical sense at the C-suite level. Where that is the culture in the industry, the CMO tends to remain longer of their roles.”
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