Study reveals shifting CMO landscape as marketing leadership titles evolve
By Felicia Nwosu
A new study from leadership advisory firm Spencer Stuart has revealed that only 40% of top marketing executives at Fortune 500 companies currently hold the Chief Marketing Officer title, signaling an evolving leadership structure within the industry.
Digiday’s reported that the research found that 33% of marketing leaders hold senior roles without the “chief” designation, such as Senior Vice President of Marketing, while 16% carry dual-function titles like Chief Marketing and Communications Officer.
Additionally, 11% of marketing heads do not have “marketing” in their title at all, with terms such as “commercial,” “growth,” “customer,” “consumer,” “brand,” and “strategy” frequently appearing in their designations.
The study, which tracked the changing dynamics of CMO roles, found that 329 Fortune 500 companies had a C-suite marketing leader in 2024, representing 66% of the total.
This marks a decline from 357 in 2023 but remains higher than the 320 recorded in 2022. The industrial sector, which is the largest in the Fortune 500, remains the least likely to have a CMO, though the number of industrial companies with marketing leadership roles has increased by five percentage points since 2022.
Meanwhile, the consumer goods sector has seen a three-percentage-point rise in companies with marketing leads, including a growing number featuring “chief” in their title.
Separate findings from Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey indicate that nearly a quarter of brands are eliminating senior marketing roles such as CMOs without direct replacements, further underscoring the transformation within executive marketing leadership.
The study also examined CMO tenure trends, revealing that the average tenure at Fortune 500 companies in 2024 stood at 4.3 years, a slight increase from 4.2 years in 2023.
Despite this uptick, CMOs still have shorter tenures compared to most other C-suite executives, whose average tenure is 4.9 years. Although CMOs remain in their roles longer than Chief Operating, Chief Sustainability, and Chief Diversity Officers, their tenure continues to lag behind many other executive positions.
However, career mobility for CMOs remains strong, with 65% of departing marketing leaders securing either lateral or higher-ranking roles at new or existing companies.
Notably, 10% of former CMOs transitioned into CEO roles, while 37% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a background in marketing.
The study also highlighted ongoing shifts in gender and racial diversity within marketing leadership. Women now account for 53% of CMO positions, up from 41% in 2020 and 47% in 2022, indicating that the role is increasingly female-led.
However, ethnic and racial diversity at the highest levels of marketing leadership remains stagnant, with only 12% of marketing executives coming from historically underrepresented ethnic or racial groups, a figure unchanged from 2023 and down from 14% in 2022.
As these structural shifts continue, Marketing Week is set to explore the industry’s gender pay gap, as well as broader disparities in ethnicity and socio-economic representation, in forthcoming reports.
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