As companies drop CMO titles, marketers may want to consider the COO role

Marketing leaders are accustomed to obsessing over conversions and churn—just not within their own ranks.

Lately, however, conversations about the chief marketing officer role have centered on its “existential crisis,” as Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar puts it. Companies are scrapping the position, not to replace it with close cousins like chief revenue officer or chief growth officer but to position ultimate responsibility for the marketing function under COOs and like-minded CEOs-in-waiting.

Following the departure of former Etsy CMO Ryan Scott in December, for example, COO Raina Moskowitz took charge of marketing at the online marketplace, and the company eliminated the stand-alone marketing role. Walgreens, UPS, and Wells Fargo have all made similar shuffles recently, casting off their CMOs and assigning marketing oversight to executives in strategy, operations, and head of business unit jobs. This month, Starbucks announced that Brady Brewer, the coffee giant’s CMO, would become CEO of Starbucks International while his old title would be retired. The next person to lead its marketing will be the “global brand chief leader”—a fine position, to be sure, but lacking the gravitas of “CMO.”

This nascent trend—redistributing and, in some cases, diminishing the CMO job—may yet prove to be short-lived. Still, marketers watching the fluctuations in their industry may want to proactively respond to the forces underlying these shifts and rethink their career paths.

That may even warrant pivoting to the COO track.

CMOs embrace data

Years ago, such a suggestion would have been far-fetched. Marketers have traditionally been top-of-the-funnel, creative types who concoct a compelling story about a brand or product and study consumer habits with an anthropologist’s eye for detail. The marketer who made Crocs cool asks: What products do people love so much that they’ll wear them at an airport?

In the past two decades, e-commerce, social media, the explosion of the direct-to-consumer category, and numerous other structural and technological developments have added complexity to the chief marketing job. Top CMOs remain artful communicators and branding professionals, though they have also mastered performance marketing, using data and analytics to hone campaigns and predict and measure results. They’re already applying an operational mindset to their work.

Yet many marketing chiefs need to acquire additional skills to stay current, says Peter Mahoney, CMO of GoTo, an IT management company and coauthor of The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence. Marketers are facing intensified pressure to justify their value and budgets to the CEO and board, he says, and for CMOs who have worked in the role for fewer than five or six years, that requirement can come as a shock.

Mahoney explains that at tech companies in particular, many of today’s less experienced marketing leads have only practiced their craft with a “growth at all costs” ethos. Now, economic forces are driving CMOs to develop deep financial literacy and a more holistic view of their job. When a COO infringes on a marketer’s turf, says Mahoney, it may be because a CMO doesn’t speak the operation chief’s love language.

Looking ahead, Mahoney predicts that marketers who aspire to maintain a seat within the C-suite—no matter the title—will need to proactively round out and deepen their financial skills while also becoming experts on once-distant concerns like data privacy and cybersecurity. “There’s going to be a great sorting algorithm,” says Mahoney. Marketers locked in an outmoded mindset, he says, “may not even be able to maintain their CMO job, let alone make it to the next rung, to COO.”

The COO job, too, has evolved and expanded to become “more transformative than ever,” writes Darryl Piasecki, a St. Louis–based managing partner for McKinsey who specializes in strategy and operations. Specifics vary depending on company size and sector, but COOs are often considered a CEO’s second-in-command and a top candidate for the corner office. More recently, as CEOs have increasingly become externally facing brand representatives, more companies have turned to COOs to take over internal affairs, says Piasecki. In 2022, 40% of Fortune 500 companies had a COO in their C-suite, an increase of eight percentage points since 2018.

Given the weight of their role, today’s COOs are expected to have a clear cross-functional understanding of every C-suite position and a deep familiarity with the markets. As they’re managing supply chain and labor strategies, for example, COOs are also immersing themselves in a company’s customer experience, the marketer’s domain.

Piasecki argues that what matters most for companies now is bringing the CMO and COO roles closer together, whether through organizational chart changes or collaboration. Companies that are looking for a competitive edge have already optimized within individual job functions; the next place to look for cost savings or opportunities for more impactful spending is in areas where two functions overlap. For instance, with consumers and business clients now demanding exceptional and personalized service, CMOs can work with COOs to pinpoint where spending on the customer experience will offer the best bang for their buck and, inversely, where precious capital would be wasted. Piasecki says his team’s research illustrates that investments in the customer can boost revenues by 10% to 15%, cut costs by up to 20%, and improve customer retention rates by more than 30%.

Merging the CMO and COO jobs

Ron Schneidermann, CEO of AllTrails, had such wins in mind when he joined the company as CMO and combined it with the COO job nine years ago. At the time, AllTrails, an app that offers members detailed maps of hiking and walking trails, excelled at finding potential customers but couldn’t always convince them to stick around. Adding COO responsibilities to his remit empowered him to develop a full view of the customer experience. “Do they create an account? Do they use your product? What’s the retention rate? Are they subscribing to our subscription plan? Are they retaining over time?”

“As CMO, if I were only focusing on people installing our app, for example, I could easily juice that number and get a whole bunch of app installs,” he says. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re good installs.”

The gamble paid off for Schneidermann, who became CEO of the firm in 2019. However, he’s careful not to suggest that his strategy would be universally beneficial or applicable in every context. How “marketing” is best assigned depends on a company’s size, complexity, and strategy, he says.

“Titles are fluid right now,“ he points out, as companies look to stay lean. Putting job names aside, prioritizing growth requires C-suite teams, including marketing leaders, to first understand who owns what. “Where there’s ambiguity,” he says, “that’s where momentum can fade.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com