A new report from Forrester Research Inc. finds that 86% of retail and wholesale Fortune 500 companies have a chief marketing officer or a marketing executive leader on the senior management team who reports directly to the CEO.
This is a high penetration, Forrester finds, as Fortune 500 companies in six of the nine industries the research firm analyzed had a lower penetration of chief marketing officers. Of all the Fortune 500 companies Forrester analyzed, only 63% had a marketing executive on the leadership team and only 55% had the chief marketing officer title specifically.
Business-to-consumer business models were the most likely companies to have chief marketing officers, with 84% penetration.
Forrester analyzed Fortune 500 companies December 2023-March 2024 in the following industries: financial services and insurance, retail and wholesale, utilities and telecommunications, business services and transportation, high-tech manufacturing, primary goods manufacturing and pharma, healthcare, energy and mining, and media/entertainment/leisure/hospitality.
The retail/wholesale industry has the longest tenure of marketing leaders, at 4.4 years, the report finds. The average chief marketing officer tenure is 4.1 years, Forrester finds.
“Broadly stated, industries with the highest marketing executive representation like financial services and insurance also show the longest tenures; industries with lower representation like energy and mining have shorter tenures,” according to the report.
The retail/wholesale industry also had a roughly even distribution of female (51%) to male (49%) chief marketing officers, the most even breakdown of all the analyzed industries. In the media/entertainment/leisure/hospitality sector, by contrast, only 33% of chief marketing officers are female, but 71% are female in the utilities and telecommunications industry.
The disparity in the retail/wholesale industry comes with the analysis of tenure by gender, with female marketing leaders having an average of 4.1 years compared with 4.7 years for males.
This is better than the average for all nine industries, in which female senior marketing leaders have an average tenure of 3.8 years compared with 4.3 years for males.
Recent changes in retail chief marketing officer roles include Gap Inc. hiring Fabiola Torres as its new global chief marketing officer, Lowe’s promoting Jennifer Wilson to chief marketing officer and Target removing its chief marketing officer and is looking to replace her.
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