Average CMO tenure holds firm at 4.2 years, according to new data

If you’ve got a chief marketing officer, odds are they’re probably still employed at your company by the time you finish reading this story.

On average, chief marketers in 2023 had held their position for 4.2 years, or about 50 months, according to head-hunting firm Spencer Stuart, which has tracked and reported on CMO tenure for nearly 20 years across 100 of the top advertisers in the US.

That figure was slightly less than the 4.6-year (or 55-month) average for the rest of the C-suite, the firm found.

Marketers might want to celebrate: Though CMO tenure in 2023 remained the same as in 2022, it was up considerably from 2021, when chief marketers held their roles for around 40 months on average, or about 3.3 years.

What else:

• In 2023, three out of four CMOs working for the top 100 advertisers were holding the position for the first time. That’s the most since Spencer Stuart began tracking the metric in 2016.
• 59% were promoted from within their own company, the same as the year before.

Among the CMOs Spencer Stuart tracked in 2023, 52% were women, essentially flat from 2022’s 53%. Among Fortune 500 companies, women CMOs achieved parity for the first time. However, CMOs from “underrepresented racial and ethnic groups” grew just 1%, to 19%, from 18% in 2022.

Sayonara: Where are all these CMOs working? Well, not at brands like Starbucks, UPS, Walgreens, and Etsy, which have all recently eliminated the position entirely.