Another group of top marketers don’t have the word “marketing” in their title at all. Instead, their position is defined with terms such as “digital” or “customer.” Example: Melanie Boulden, chief growth officer at Tyson Foods.
The final 7% hold titles that feature neither “chief” nor “marketing,” such as Cynthia Yazdi, senior vice president of communications and brand at Motorola Solutions.
The complications, however, don’t end there.
Last year, the consulting firm McKinsey, in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers, surveyed a group of CMOs about their company’s structure. More than two-thirds said their organization has two or more C-suite leaders who oversee marketing-related activities and report directly to the CEO. Examples include chief revenue officers, chief commercial officers and chief creative officers.
This situation, the researchers argue, has made the top marketer’s task more byzantine due to competing budgets and overlapping responsibilities.
“Companies have taken that CMO job and broken it across multiple roles,” said Robert Tas, a partner at McKinsey and a co-author of the report.
Sometimes a title is just that—a title. The underlying work and skillsets are more or less the same. And no one expects every business, whether B2C or B2B, to have the same marketing goals.
But the rise of the fractional CMO, for instance, points to an expanding mosaic of needs that’s not appearing in other C-suite positions.
“When I’ve seen job specifications for chief financial officers, 80% of them look the same—they all have the same org charts, the same people reporting into them,” said Sanderson. “I have yet to see two marketing leaders who have the same org chart.”
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