The CMO Role Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.

When Kimberly A. Whitler teaches senior marketing leaders, she often kicks off with a provocative scenario:

“You’re a C-suite executive. One of your direct reports isn’t performing. What do you do?”

“Put them on a performance plan,” someone offers.
“Move them,” says another.
“Fire them,” comes the inevitable reply.

And if that poor performer is the chief marketing officer, the one charged with driving revenue growth at the firm? Should they be shown the door?

That’s when Whitler, the Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, flashes a photo of the Philadelphia Eagles.

“What if the real problem is that the role wasn’t designed properly?” she asks. “To a CEO, a CMO is a CMO is a CMO. But anyone who understands football knows there’s a world of difference between a quarterback, a linebacker and a punt returner. What happens when you put a punt returner in a quarterback role? They fail.”

This isn’t just a metaphor. In a new study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Whitler, and co-authors Lopo L. Rego from the Kelley School of Business and Neil A. Morgan from the Wisconsin School of Business, find that 54% of CMO roles are poorly designed. Expectations often clash with responsibilities and success metrics.

“It shows how difficult it is for companies to design the CMO role effectively,” says Whitler, who teaches C-level marketing leadership in Darden’s flagship Executive Program (TEP).

No wonder CMOs have the highest turnover rate in the C-suite.

The authors found that nearly a third of the companies in their data set had three or more CMOs within 10 years. “That’s a signal that they don’t know how to design the role,” says Whitler. “It’s not that the CMO is failing, it’s a role-design problem.”

The solution, say Whitler and colleagues, is to rethink how the roles are defined.

Designing the Role — or Setting the Stage

At the heart of Whitler’s research is a deceptively simple question: What exactly is a CMO supposed to do?

To make sense of this, the authors turn to role theory, a sociological framework that borrows from the world of theater. In this view, every job — like every part in a play — has three core components: the role itself (the part), the person who fills it (the actor), and the environment in which it’s performed (the stage or production). Whether on Broadway or in the boardroom, a mismatch among these elements can doom even the most talented performer.

In the C-suite, that miscast role is often the CMO.

“CEOs may see all CMOs as interchangeable,” says Whitler. “But just like you wouldn’t put a punt returner in as quarterback, you can’t expect every CMO to succeed in any version of the role.”

To map this complexity, Whitler and her colleagues developed the first conceptual model of CMO Role Design. The model breaks down the CMO role into three interconnected layers: CMO role characteristics, context factors and consequences:

CMO Role Characteristics

• Person-based characteristics: These cover the candidate’s competencies, background, experience and education.
• Position-based characteristics: These are the structural boundaries of the job — what the CMO is expected to do, what resources they’re given, how much authority they have, and what they’re accountable for.

Contextual factors

This includes both internal elements (such as company strategy, structure and culture) and external ones (such as market dynamics and regulatory constraints), as well as factors such as whether the CMO sits on the executive team or participates in board meetings and CMO turnover.

These components interact to shape whether a CMO can successfully “activate” the role. The stakes are high as misalignment between the person, the position and the context often leads to poor outcomes and fast turnover.

The “consequences” include brand equity, customer relationships and overall firm performance.

To illustrate the model, the researchers use a cinematic analogy. Think of the “James Bond” films. There are role characteristics — in this case, the part of 007. Then the person characteristics. Sean Connery is widely seen as the archetypal 007 — not just because of talent, but because his style and experience aligned perfectly with the role at the time. Roger Moore, on the other hand, played a more humorous, suave Bond who didn’t always resonate the same way.

Importantly, while Sean Connery was seen as a good fit for the 007 role, there were other roles in which he was not a good fit (for example “Sir Billi”), reinforcing the importance of alignment between the person-, position-based characteristics and context in which the role is performed, the authors write.

And finally, context. Some Bond films resonate more with audiences thanks to a compelling villain, memorable action sequences, or the actor's charisma, while others may suffer from a weaker plot or a less engaging performance. 

How does this apply to CMOs?

“There are position-based characteristics that go with the part of a CMO,” explains Whitler. “Their responsibilities, and so forth. Then the person-based characteristics, such as how much experience the person has, or their education, or their training. The attributes of the position and the person have to fit together, and, in many cases, they don’t. It’s a square peg in a round hole.”

The Influence of Status

One especially potent contextual factor is the status of the CMO role relative to others in the executive suite. The research shows that status shapes whether a CMO can translate experience and responsibility into real impact.

Why does status matter? Because CMOs rarely act alone. Executing marketing programs often requires cooperation from peers — finance, product, operations. A higher-status CMO is more likely to gain respect, influence decisions and coordinate efforts across departments. Lower status can result in resistance, marginalization, or simply being ignored.

“We find that status amplifies the effect,” says Whitler, before invoking the football analogy. “When you have a quarterback position designed well, and a quarterback enters the role and you give them more status, you get better, more positive results. When there’s misalignment, you get worse results.”

Whitler adds, “What is important here — and noteworthy — is that when you give more status to a misaligned role, such that the responsibility and CMO experience don’t match, you actually get worse results. Giving more status to CMOs isn’t always better. It’s only effective when you have alignment in the role design.”

A Practical Tool for Getting CMO Role Design Right

The research is clear: misaligned CMO roles can tank marketing effectiveness — and careers. But what can CEOs, executive recruiters and candidates do to prevent these missteps?

In their 2022 MIT Sloan Management Review article Set Up to Fail, Whitler and co-authors Ed Tazzia and Stephen Mann (Darden ’21) provide a practical tool.

The authors analyzed 185 C-level job specifications for CFO, CIO and CMO roles. The results were sobering. They found widespread misalignment between what companies expected C-level leaders to deliver, what they were actually empowered to do, and the skills they were required to bring: 41% of the time the expectations didn’t match the candidate qualifications, and in over one-third of cases, responsibilities didn’t align with the experience listed.

To address this disconnect, the authors developed a tool they call the Job Alignment Map that is designed to develop better job specifications or evaluate whether the role described in an existing job spec is well designed. It covers six key elements:

1. Expectations: What specific organizational outcomes is the individual role expected to drive?
2. Required responsibilities: What are the specific duties and function over which the role needs to have authority in order to meet expectations?
3. Assigned responsibilities: What are the specific areas of responsibility assigned? Do they match those required to meet expectations?
4. Required skills: What are the specific skills, experiences and training that the individual in the role needs to meet in order to meet expectations?
5. Skills listed: What are the specific skills and qualifications listed in the job spec? Do they match those required?
6. Performance measures: What are the specific, quantifiable measures against which the C-level executive’s performance will be evaluated? To ensure an aligned role, the measures should be appropriate indicators of progress toward expectations.

The tool is intended to help leaders — and job candidates — evaluate whether a role is designed for success or headed for trouble.

For example, if a job spec asks a CMO to “create and drive the growth agenda” but doesn’t give them authority over corporate strategy, product, innovation, pricing, distribution, or sales, well, that’s a red flag. The tool makes those misalignments visible and fixable. Executive recruiters can redesign roles to align responsibility with expectations. CMOs can use the map to clarify performance metrics or to negotiate more aligned between responsibilities and expectations before stepping into the job.

Whitler’s research on role design and the development of an alignment tool should help CEOs, executive recruiters and CMOs design more effective CMO roles.

“My hope is that executive recruiters do a better job of aligning the role,” says Whitler. “But CMOs also have to do their due diligence. I recommend CMOs throw away the job spec. It’s designed to entice you to take the job and oftentimes, it’s not representative of the actual role. You have to interview the CEO and ask: What are my responsibilities? What are the measures for success? Then look at the structure of the firm and the budget and team. Make sure to negotiate the right role so you have the foundation for future success.”

Professor Kimberly A. Whitler is co-author of “Chief Marketing Officer Role Design” (2025) with Lopo L. Rego of Kelly School of Business and Neil A. Morgan of Wisconsin School of Business, published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

She is also co-author of “Why CMOs Never Last and What to Do About It” (2017 )published in Harvard Business Review, and “Set up to Fail: Poor Design of C-Suite Jobs can Block Executives from Succeeding in their Roles” (2022), published in MIT Sloan Management Review.