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CMO Tenure Study 2025: The Evolution of Marketing Leadership

March 2025

The data on chief marketing officers (CMOs) at Fortune 500 companies shows not only the role’s evolution, but also its continued importance in the C-suite and its growing attractiveness as a pathway to larger leadership roles.

Some of the statistics on CMOs — particularly average tenure (4.3 years) and the roughly one-third of Fortune 500 companies that lack an enterprise-wide marketing leader — are sometimes portrayed as negative indicators for the role. However, we believe the opposite is actually at play. Nearly two-thirds of CMOs who exit their roles are either being promoted to more senior roles or are making lateral moves to other attractive CMO positions. Further, our experience has shown how the existence of a central marketing chief, or lack thereof, almost always says more about the dynamics and strategic focus of a particular company than it does about the importance of marketing leadership.

For more than 20 years, Spencer Stuart has tracked the tenure and background of chief marketing officers. This year, using data exclusively from Fortune 500 companies, we look at the leading trends for CMOs at top companies and how they reflect marketers’ ever-evolving roles.

CMOs: Onward and upward

Average CMO tenure at Fortune 500 companies in 2024 was 4.3 years, a slight upward tick from 2023 (4.2). CMO tenure still trails the C-suite average of 4.9 years, and is lower than the most common C-suite roles other than chief operating officer (albeit higher than the average tenures of chief sustainability and chief diversity officers).

That said, the data shows that for the majority of CMOs, the next step after leaving the role is either lateral or upward. Almost two-thirds (65%) of exiting CMOs at Fortune 500 companies were either promoted within their companies, or they moved to lateral or step-up positions within new companies. Ten percent of the CMOs who left their roles became CEOs; today, 37% of Fortune 500 CEOs had some amount of functional experience in marketing in their route to the top.

4.3

F500 CMO average tenure

65%

Exiting F500 CMOs who leave for similar or bigger role

37%

F500 CEOs with some marketing experience in route up

Two-thirds of companies have an enterprise marketing leader

According to Spencer Stuart research, 329 of the Fortune 500 companies (66%) in 2024 had a C-suite marketing leader, a drop of nearly 8 percentage points from 2023 (357) but still higher than 2022 (320).

As noted above, this is the kind of number that often draws negative headlines, especially when high-profile companies decide to decentralize marketing. However, the reality is much more complex, and is usually more of a reflection of a company’s unique needs at a particular moment in time rather than a sign of marketing’s overall demise. Some companies incorporate marketing with other functional responsibilities, break up their marketing leadership by business unit or region, or even use hybrid structures where some responsibilities are managed enterprise-wide while others are managed by business units or regions.

34%

F500 companies without an enterprise CMO

58%

F500 CMOs promoted from within their current company

68%

F500 first-time CMOs

And a look at changes within a few high-profile companies shows how the marketing structure can ebb and flow, even over a short period. For example, Lowe’s eliminated its CMO position in 2022 and placed marketing under the chief merchandising officer; in 2024 the company revived the CMO role. In early 2024, Starbucks eliminated its CMO role in favor of regional CEOs; less than a year later it brought marketing back to the C-suite when it hired a new global chief brand officer.

An industry-level look at the data also paints a fuller picture on how the CMO position is trending in the S&P 500. For example, industrial is the largest industry sector in the Fortune 500, and it is also the least likely to have a CMO; that said, the number of industrial companies with a marketing leader has increased 5 percentage points since 2022. In consumer goods, the share of companies with a marketing lead has increased 3 percentage points, including a corresponding increase in the share with “chief” in their title. Meanwhile, rates in healthcare and financial services have remained steady, and the technology, media and telecommunications industry has taken a slight dip.

CMO by a different name

We continue to see a notable number of marketing leadership roles whose titles go beyond leadership positions with the word marketing. Overall, 40% of Fortune 500 marketing leaders are in roles simply titled chief marketing officer, and 16% have marketing plus another function in their title (such as chief marketing and communications officer). Another 33% have marketing in their title but not the word chief (e.g., SVP of marketing). Lastly, 11% of the marketing leaders we have identified do not have the word marketing in their title at all. The most common words that appear in those titles are commercial, growth, customer/consumer, brand and strategy.

F500 marketing leadership titles

At a practical level, title evolution reflects the combination of marketing with sales, with the CMO role either being subsumed by a broader commercial leadership role or alternately expanded to include much more. It’s a sign that more companies are shifting marketing to make it more overtly focused on delivering revenue. It’s also a clue that, looking ahead to the next generation of leaders, companies will be seeking talent with broad expertise covering many areas, rather than straightforward growth within one niche. Take the chief customer officer position, for example, designed with a nod to the increasing complexity of the customer journey. Think of a customer who browses products on a mobile phone, buys a product in a store and then returns the product by shipping it. An effective chief customer officer needs a broad range of skills that enable them to operate at the intersection of marketing, technology and HR in order to meet customer demands and drive revenues.

At the granular level, these title variances also often reflect the unique circumstances of either a company or its marketing leader. Some companies have embraced titles that directly address current strategic goals, such as customer engagement or revenue growth. Others are seeking to attract or retain top marketing leaders by creating “CMO+” types of roles that widen the chief marketer’s purview to include areas beyond marketing’s traditional boundaries.

Diversity data varies

In terms of gender diversity, the CMO role has officially become a female-focused function, as 53% of CMOs today are women, an overall increase of 12 percentage points since 2020. On the other hand, ethnic and racial diversity are stagnant at the highest ranks of CMO. Only 12% of marketing leaders come from historically underrepresented ethnic or racial groups.

It can take decades for diversity efforts to yield results; the impact of the many recent efforts to diversify the function may not be fully felt for many years. However, the data shows how much room for growth there remains.

53%

F500 CMO roles held by women

12%

F500 CMO roles held by people from historically underrepresented racial or ethnic groups

Methodology

The study is based on an analysis of the tenures and backgrounds of CMOs from the 329 named CMOs of Fortune 500 companies as of June 30, 2024.

© 2025 Spencer Stuart