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Shedding light on the CMO revolving door: a study of the antecedents of Chief Marketing Officer turnover

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Abstract

Investigating Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) tenure through a longitudinal study of the antecedents of CMO turnover, the authors find that CMO turnover increases if firms’ sales growth is poor, while profitability has a similar though smaller effect when a new CEO is appointed, highlighting marketing’s contextual role vis-à-vis performance metrics. Coupled with other results related to industry sales growth and stability that make CMO turnover less likely, these findings underscore marketing’s demand- or customer-facing role in the firm. The authors also show that some of these results are distinct to turnover among CMOs compared to other top management team (TMT) executives. While this research does show support for extant theory, its focus on the CMO within the TMT results in important contributions to the turnover literature. These include the inverted-U effect of TMT marketing experience on CMO turnover and the nuanced attenuation by CMO insider-ness of a similar relationship between CMO tenure and turnover. Overall, the results lead to important practical implications for managing CMO turnover.

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Notes

  1. Table 1 lists how the CMO and the TMT are identified in prior CMO-related research and in this study.

  2. For example, we have precluded theoretical lenses such as life cycles and agency theory, which have been used in the context of CEO succession but which we argue are respectively less relevant to CMO turnover, given that CEOs tend to stay in this position for longer periods compared to CMOs, and that while CEO appointments and exits are driven by boards, the decisions related to the CMO position are usually made by the CEO, often in consultation with the rest of the TMT (Drazin and Rao 1999 make a similar point in their study of SBU manager turnover).

  3. An additional theoretical possibility is that of inertia among longer tenured CMOs, suggesting a cubic discrete- time hazard, where the likelihood of CMO turnover increases again after many years in the job. We do not hypothesize such an effect given the prevailing belief of relatively short CMO tenures but we do test for it empirically.

  4. Our hypothesis here predicts a simple interaction between the linear CMO tenure effect and CMO insider-ness such that the linear positive slope of CMO tenure would depend on the value of CMO insider-ness. In this scenario, the negative slope of the quadratic CMO tenure term is a constant and does not vary with insider-ness, which is what we argue here. However, we also test empirically for a higher-order interaction with the quadratic term of CMO tenure where this negative slope could also potentially depend on insider-ness.

  5. We thank the Area Editor for suggesting this hypothesis.

  6. Specifically, the 12 industries covered at the 2-digit Standard Industry Classification (SIC) level are: 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 56, 58, and 73.

  7. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the inclusion of these control variables.

  8. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the inclusion of this control variable.

  9. Note that an interaction with a higher order term requires that all lower order interactions also be included in the model (Aiken and West 1991). Therefore, we also include the interaction with the linear term of CMO Tenure.

  10. Note that the number of CMOs in the sample decreases substantially as we reach higher values of CMO tenure. For example, there are only 16 CMOs with over 7 years of tenure and 8 with over 8 years (we therefore limit the range of tenure to 10 years in Figure 2, Panel A, for illustration purposes). Thus, even though we observe curves with relatively lower hazards become relatively higher after the point where the curves cross, suggesting that insiders can have a higher hazard of turnover than outsiders contrary to H1, we cannot make strong inferences about this at these rather high values of CMO tenure. We do however see a gradually increasing hazard for high insider-ness, which as mentioned in the body of the paper, we discuss subsequently.

  11. Since both these variables are computed using the same set of 5-year lagged values of median industry sales growth, we mean-centered them to capture the true interaction effect, and report all results using these values. We also expressed them as percentages to keep their estimated interaction coefficient within a reasonable range, which essentially scales down their coefficients by 100, and their interaction coefficient by 104.

  12. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue, enabling us to demonstrate the robustness of our results.

  13. Since Model J is carried out on the subsample of firm-years with a CMO, we also include the Inverse Mills’ Ratio (IMR) and find that it is significant, suggesting that sample selection on CMO presence is an issue for CEO-level outcomes, though the inclusion of the IMR corrects for it. We do not similarly include the IMR for Model K, since we have already shown in Model I that sample selection is not an issue when considering CMO-level outcomes.

  14. We do also find some indication of CMO turnover being an undesirable event in our sample. Specifically, the correlation between contemporaneous sales growth and CMO turnover, both firm-averaged, is negative (−.14) and significant (p < .01), suggesting that firms that experience greater churn, or relatively quicker CMO exits (and perhaps commensurate shorter CMO tenures) have relatively poor growth outcomes. We found a similar correlation with profitability (−.26, p < .01). We present these results with the caveat that they are not based on a systematic empirical analysis; such a study of the outcomes of CMO turnover or tenures is beyond the scope of this research.

  15. We thank the Area Editor for raising this issue.

  16. The non-significance of both performance metrics in predicting TMT turnover is similar to the result that Wiersema and Bantel (1993) find for profitability, but is in contrast to the significant negative effects of profitability in Wagner et al. (1984) and growth in Boeker (1992). Notably, however, profitability is negatively correlated with TMT turnover as reported in Table 2, and for our full sample (not reported here). And, Boeker’s (1992) finding is not surprising given that his study’s sample is made up of relatively young and small firms that are “willing to operate at a low level of profitability while building market share, especially when first starting” (p.409).

  17. These coefficients are significant in Model J of Table 4. However, we rely more on the results of Model R for CEO turnover, since it is on the entire sample of firm-years, whereas Model J is only on the subset with a CMO.

  18. We did carry out analyses using a change measure from t-2 to t-1 for the firm-level variables of sales growth, profitability, R&D, and advertising, to account for adaptation by the CMO on these antecedents, instead of the t-1 values used in the models reported in the paper. However, our results from these models are substantively similar to those presented in Tables 3 and 4; we therefore do not report or discuss them in detail in the interest of space.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would thank Raji Srinivasan and the faculty and doctoral students at the University of Texas-Arlington for their valuable comments and suggestions on a previous version of the paper.

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  1. Division of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, Michael F. Price College of Business, The University of Oklahoma, 307 West Brooks, AH Room 1D, Norman, OK, 73019, USA

    Pravin Nath

  2. Department of Marketing, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, B6200, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Vijay Mahajan

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Nath, P., Mahajan, V. Shedding light on the CMO revolving door: a study of the antecedents of Chief Marketing Officer turnover. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 45, 93–118 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-016-0478-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-016-0478-5

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