Is the CMO Still Expendable? | Sept 2026

I keep hearing the same thing about marketing leaders.

The CMO has the shortest shelf life in the C-suite. Sometimes you even hear that the average CMO lasts less than 2 years. Except the current data doesn't really support that narrative.

Spencer Stuart's latest research puts average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 at 4.1 years. That's shorter than many C-suite positions, but it's certainly not an 18-month revolving door.

And here's the part I find much more interesting.

Why are we still talking about CMOs as expendable at exactly the moment marketing is becoming more important to the business?

You see, the CMO job has changed enormously.

20 years ago, many senior marketers built their careers primarily around brand, advertising, communications and large agency relationships.

Today's CMO is being asked to understand all of that plus digital, performance, customer experience, e-commerce, data, technology, AI, attribution, conversion and increasingly, the P&L.

That's not a shrinking role. That's an expanding one. And perhaps that's part of the problem.

We keep adding responsibility to marketing while expecting increasingly immediate results.

Hire a new CMO.

Give them an aggressive growth target.

Fix the brand. Lower CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). Improve conversion. Generate leads. Rebuild the website. Introduce AI. Fix the customer journey. Make sales happy.

And, by the way, could we see some results next quarter?

Then 18 months later, when growth isn't happening quickly enough, we start wondering whether we hired the wrong CMO.

Maybe sometimes we did. But maybe sometimes we hired the right person and gave them the wrong mandate, unrealistic expectations or simply not enough time.

There is another fascinating piece of data in Spencer Stuart's research. Of the S&P 500 CMOs who left their roles between 2021 and 2025, 62% were promoted or moved into a similar or bigger role. 9% became CEOs.

That doesn't sound like a profession full of failed executives. It sounds like a profession producing increasingly valuable business leaders.

Maybe we need to rethink what 20 years of marketing experience is supposed to look like.

The modern CMO may not have spent 20 years building traditional brands. That's because many of the capabilities we now expect them to lead barely existed 20 years ago.

I'd be much more interested in whether they understand how brand, digital, performance, customer experience and commercial strategy work together.

Can they understand the customer?

Can they create demand?

Can they build a brand people trust?

Can they use data without becoming completely beholden to it?

Can they connect marketing investment to business performance?

And can they keep adapting as technology changes how customers discover and buy?

If they can, I'm not sure we should be talking about their shelf life. We should be talking about how to keep them.