Marketing in the C-Suite: A Study of Chief Marketing Officer Power in Firms' Top Management Teams

Abstract

Some chief marketing officers (CMOs) are more powerful than others. The authors investigate the drivers and outcomes of this phenomenon using a hierarchical measure of power for the CMO in the top management team (TMT), or corporate executive suite (C-suite). Theory suggests that CMO power in the TMT should increase with (1) the CMO's control over resources required by other executives in the C-suite, (2) the criticality and (3) effective provision of these resources, and (4) the nonsubstitutability and (5) centrality of the CMO. The authors use these rationales to identify factors that affect CMO power in public U.S. firms with the CMO position for at least two of the five observed years. The findings show that CMO power increases when the CMO has the additional responsibility of sales, as TMT marketing experience decreases, and as firms with low levels of TMT marketing experience pursue innovation. Furthermore, CMO power in highly divisionalized TMTs and the CMO's additional responsibility of sales improve sales growth, but CMO power in firms that are unrelated diversifiers reduces profitability. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results for marketing's influence in the C-suite and the firm, the integration of marketing and sales, and market orientation. ). The authors thank Girish Ramani, the faculty and doctoral students at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Department of Management and Marketing, and the anonymous JM reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.

The copycat CMO: firms’ imitative behavior as an explanation for CMO presence

“…The second, larger group of studies uses CMO-related constructs to explain firm outcome variables. Some of these studies examine the relationship between CMO presence and various measures of firm performance (Boyd et al 2010;Germann et al 2015;Nath and Mahajan 2008;Nath and Mahajan 2011), while others link CMO characteristics (e.g., education) to firm-related outcomes (Homburg et al 2014;Wang et al 2015;Wang et al 2016), examine how CMO compensation is related to firm performance (Bansal et al 2016;Kim et al 2016), or consider the influence of CMO presence on marketingrelated decisions (Boyd and Brown 2012;Mintz and Currim 2013). In the small third group of CMO-related studies in the marketing literature, which examines the CMO's situation, Nath and Mahajan (2011) find that several contingencies impact the CMO's influence in the TMT, Engelen et al (2013) identify social capital as one of the drivers of CMO influence, and Nath and Mahajan (2017) identify drivers of CMO turnover.…”

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“…In this measure, used by Nath and Mahajan (2011), the titles of executives were used to determine the levels of the TMT members (e.g., senior vice presidents were at a higher level in the TMT than vice presidents, with the CEO at the highest level). Firms without a CMO present in the TMT in a particular year were given a score of 0.…”

The name's the game: Does marketing impact the value of corporate name changes?

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