The CMO Is Being Quietly Dismantled — Here's What Replaces It
The pure 'Chief Marketing Officer' title is being absorbed into broader customer, growth and commerce roles across US retail and hospitality — and the marketers who thrive in 2027 will be the ones who own the whole customer relationship, not just the message.
The pattern hiding in the headlines
Read the US marketing moves of the last few weeks in isolation and they look like ordinary reshuffles. Read them together and a structural shift appears. Kohl's folded marketing into a new Chief Customer Officer as its CMO left. Target hired a former Hilton CMO specifically to fuse marketing with guest experience. Lowe's handed its CMO responsibility for digital commerce. The job keeps getting a bigger remit and, often, a different name.
This is not an accident of hiring season. It is the logical endpoint of a decade in which the lines between marketing, data, e-commerce and customer service collapsed. When the same customer signal flows from an ad to an app to a store to a support chat, splitting ownership of that journey across four executives starts to look like a design flaw.
Why the title is mutating now
Three forces are squeezing the classic CMO. First, boards want marketing measured like every other P&L line, and a leader who owns acquisition but not retention or commerce can never fully answer for revenue. Second, AI is automating the executional core of marketing — media buying, content production, optimisation — so the senior value shifts upstream to strategy and downstream to the customer relationship. Third, the 'customer' has become the organising principle: it is easier to defend a Chief Customer Officer to a CEO than a Chief Marketing Officer, because the former sounds like growth and the latter still sounds, unfairly, like cost.
Marketing Minute's read is that the function is not shrinking — it is being promoted and renamed at the same time. The brands dismantling the CMO title are mostly handing those people more power, not less. The risk is for marketers who defined themselves narrowly as campaign-makers; the opportunity is for those who can speak data, commerce and service as fluently as they speak brand.
What to do before the title reaches you
If you lead marketing, the defensive and offensive move are the same: annex the customer journey beyond the campaign. Get your hands on retention metrics, loyalty data and post-purchase experience now, while it is a choice rather than a reorg forced on you. The marketer who already reports on lifetime value, not just reach, is the one who gets the bigger job rather than the redundancy.
For smaller businesses the lesson is cleaner still. You never had the luxury of separating 'marketing' from 'the customer' — the founder usually does both. That blurring, long treated as an SME weakness, is exactly the model large companies are now rebuilding at great expense. Own the whole relationship, measure it end to end, and you are already working the way the Fortune 500 is scrambling to.
Quick FAQ
Is the CMO role disappearing?
Not disappearing — mutating. The pure marketing title is increasingly absorbed into Chief Customer, Chief Growth or combined marketing-and-commerce roles with a wider remit over the full customer journey.
What skills protect a marketer through this shift?
Fluency in data and commerce, ownership of retention and lifetime value, and the ability to tie marketing activity to revenue — not just campaign craft.
The CMO isn't dying, it's being handed a bigger desk with a new nameplate. The marketers who panic are the ones who only ever owned the message. The ones who already own the customer relationship end to end are about to be the most valuable people in the building. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
The job is widening, not shrinking. Own retention, data and commerce now — before a reorg decides who does.
Does your marketing leader report on lifetime value and retention today — or only on reach and campaigns?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Sources: Marketing Dive; company announcements; Marketing Minute analysis.
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Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
