Dive Brief:
- The average tenure of chief marketing officers at S&P 500 companies stands at 4.1 years, with only chief operating officers seeing briefer stints in the C-suite, according to the latest annual survey of the CMO role by Spencer Stuart.
- Turnover is more pronounced at consumer brands, where average CMO tenure sits at 3.5 years, the lowest among industries analyzed. Spencer Stuart emphasized that the trend doesn’t always signal a revolving-door culture.
- Nearly two-thirds of CMO exits tracked between 2021-2025 saw executives climb the ranks, including 9% who were promoted to CEO. Thirty-one percent of companies have no CMO at all, in line with historical averages, while more are creating “CMO-plus” positions such as chief commercial and revenue officers.
Dive Insight:
CMO tenure remains short compared to the rest of the C-suite, where averages hover closer to the five-year range. Spencer Stuart has taken care to underscore that higher levels of churn aren’t necessarily correlated to negative outcomes, and in many cases can be a sign of advancement.
Sixty-two percent of departing CMOs went on to equivalent or bigger roles, including CEO titles, in a four-year span assessed by the executive-search firm. Among CMOs departing a brand, 77% landed at a new company within six months. The jump from CMO to CEO was more apparent at consumer brands, which have the lowest average tenure for marketing chiefs by industry, followed by healthcare.
These moves may benefit individual executive’s careers but other research indicates that CMO volatility can be disruptive to long-term brand building. CMOs are also contending with flat or declining resources, according to Gartner, while wrestling with the adoption of emergent technologies like artificial intelligence.
In some verticals, marketing positions are in flux and not always handled by someone bearing the CMO title, per Spencer Stuart — a sign of changing mandates. Retailers, for instance, are more often hiring chief customer officers that not only handle traditional brand and creative duties, but also omnichannel and even in-store expertise. Chief commercial officers that juggle both sales and marketing are more common in the hospitality space, while software firms may prioritize chief revenue officers over CMOs.
CMOs tend to be appointed internally, with just 38% joining an organization as external hires, though that metric varies by category. For instance, 47% of financial services CMOs were brought on from an outside firm and 43% came from different industries entirely, which suggests marketing is being more highly valued as a potential revenue driver within these organizations.
Half of CMOs at S&P 500 companies are women, well above other executive leadership posts (91% of CEOs are men, to cite an example of extreme disparity). However, CMOs have demonstrated “limited progress” with representation elsewhere, Spencer Stuart said. Only 9% come from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups versus 12% who have those backgrounds in the rest of the C-suite.
Spencer Stuart’s findings were drawn from an analysis of 346 named marketing chiefs at S&P 500 companies as of June of last year. Past CMO reports from the firm, including ones from 2024 and 2025, examined CMOs at Fortune 500 businesses.
