CMOs’ waning influence in the C-suite is a setback for female executives

– More than marketing. In 2022, women outnumbered men in chief marketing officer jobs for the first time, according to a study by Spencer Stuart. New hires were to thank for that milestone; women held 51% of all CMO jobs that year and represented 70% of new appointees.

But—as so often happens—it seems that women reached a milestone only to have the rug pulled out from under them. My Coins2Day colleague Phil Wahba has a new story about the waning influence of the CMO job in corporate C-suites. In December alone, UPS eliminated the CMO job; Etsy gave its CMO’s responsibilities to its COO; and Walgreens laid off CMO Linh Peters and spread out her job’s functions.

The end of the autonomous CMO role, at some companies, is part of a longtime trend. CMOs who once focused on marketing and advertising in print and TV now find themselves in tech-heavy jobs, driven by customer data, and needing the input of other C-suite executives focused on tech and operations. It’s no longer a role that can be handled by—or requires—one executive, companies seem to have decided.

It’s a bit of a paradox. During the pandemic, the ability of an executive “to tell the story of a company” became more valuable, whether those skills were in marketing or communications, Korn Ferry’s Jane Stevenson told me last year. A higher value placed on those skills began to open up opportunities, like CEO jobs and board seats, for marketing executives—many of them women—who once saw CMO as the highest they could go. Openness to new areas of expertise and non-CEO candidates has helped boards to diversify. Still, today less than 5% of Coins2Day 1000 companies have a marketer on their board of directors; those that do are consumer-facing brands including Best Buy, Mattel, and Nike, Phil found.

How these jobs are structured seems to be changing, yet it remains to be seen whether the evolution is permanent. As of today, 71% of the Coins2Day 500 still has a marketing chief, and some companies that cut the job may end up rethinking the decision. McDonald’s got rid of its global CMO role in 2019 but brought it back less than a year later.

Read more in Phil’s full story here.

Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet is Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

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- Last woman standing. Today's primary in New Hampshire will be a test for Nikki Haley, the last candidate standing against Donald Trump in the contest for the GOP presidential nomination. While Trump leads Haley in New Hampshire polls, anti-Trump Republican women have expressed relief at having another option besides the former president. Reuters

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- Major mistake. Kyte Baby CEO Ying Liu apologized twice on Friday to a former employee at the baby clothing company who was fired for requesting to work remotely while staying at a neonatal intensive care unit with her newborn. CNN

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ON MY RADAR

Stanley cups are not a feminist issue New Statesman

Coco Gauff is enjoying a very different kind of Grand Slam The Athletic

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Roe v. Wade wasn’t overturned by accident. Now we need to fight back Glamour

PARTING WORDS

“It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”

—Director Sofia Coppola in a New Yorker  profile describing the difficulties of being a woman in the film industry, even with the advantage of a famous family