Mark Ritson published a column this week that every chief executive hiring a senior marketer should read. Writing in The Drum, he noticed that the CMO title has started arriving with extra words attached. Target has just appointed a chief marketing and guest experience officer. Wendy's has a chief marketing and customer growth officer. Kohl's went further and dropped the M-word altogether, folding marketing into a chief customer officer role. His reading is blunt. The title is growing longer because the role underneath it has shrunk, and the extra words are an attempt to regrow it. You can read the full column here.
He quotes Spencer Stuart, the executive search firm, which now talks openly about CMO-plus roles and notes that only 69% of S&P 500 companies have an enterprise-level marketing leader at all. The extra letters, Ritson argues, are a chaperone, added to reassure the rest of the C-suite that the senior marketer will spend the budget responsibly.
What the title inflation is really telling you
A title grows longer when trust in the job behind it has thinned. Nobody felt the need to call Tim Cook the chief executive and commercial outcomes officer. The job carries its own authority. When a marketing leader needs customer, growth or experience added to their business card, someone in that organisation has already decided marketing alone does not sound commercial enough to sit at the top table.
I see the same pattern from the other side in Irish companies a fraction of that size. A founder tells me they need a CMO. When we talk it through, what they actually need is a person who can sit in a leadership meeting, look at the pipeline and the pricing, and decide where the next quarter of growth comes from. Sometimes that person is a permanent CMO. Often, at that stage, the company needs the authority and the judgement before it needs the forty hours a week.
The distinction matters because companies hire the title and leave out the authority. The new senior marketer arrives, finds the segment choices already made, the budget scattered across pet channels, and no agreed number they own. Within a year the company concludes the hire was wrong. The hire was rarely the problem. The remit was.
Commercial authority is the actual job description
Strip the title away and the senior marketing job is a set of commercial decisions. Which buyers the company will prioritise and which it will politely decline. What the company wants to be known for solving. How much to spend, where, and against what expected return. Which work stops so better work can start. What number marketing answers for alongside sales.
A leader with the standing to make those calls, and the access to deal values, win and loss patterns and margin to make them well, will improve a company whatever their business card says. A leader with CMO on the door and none of that authority will keep the content calendar full and change very little.
This is also why I am not precious about what the role is called in a smaller company. Fractional CMO, outsourced marketing director, part-time head of marketing. All of them can work. The test I apply is Ritson's test in miniature. Does this person walk into the room with the authority to choose, or do they arrive as a chaperone for the marketing budget?
What to do before you write the job spec
If you are a chief executive approaching this hire, borrow the exercise Ritson is really pointing at. Write down the decisions you want this person to own, the commercial number they will answer for, and the access they will have to the figures that shape those decisions. Then decide the seniority, the commitment level and finally the title.
Companies that do it in that order tend to find the answer is senior leadership on a flexible commitment while the growth model is being proven, moving to a permanent executive once the engine justifies one. Companies that start with the title tend to spend a year learning the same lesson at executive salary cost.
The long titles are a symptom. The cure is giving one senior person genuine commercial authority over marketing, and holding them to it.