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The Job Is Splitting. Pick a Side.

Your 2027 plan has two slides that no longer belong to the same person.

One carries brand health. Unaided awareness, consideration, the pricing power you have spent three years rebuilding. The other carries pipeline contribution, cost per opportunity, payback. You built both, because both have been your job since the day you took the seat.

At some point in the review, a board member asks which of the two you are accountable for. You say both. That answer used to be the argument for having a CMO at all. Chipotle, Meta and GM have each taken it apart since last November.

Chipotle did it in one press release on April 27. Fernando Machado was named chief brand officer effective June 1, with global marketing strategy, brand positioning, and customer engagement under him. Arlie Sisson was named chief digital officer, a newly formed role reporting to Curt Garner, the president and chief strategy and technology officer (Chipotle 8-K exhibit, April 27, 2026). Both halves of the old job were announced the same morning, and the digital half went under strategy and technology.

Meta ran the same arithmetic nine weeks later. On July 1, it named Denise Moreno chief marketing officer and moved Alex Schultz, who had held the CMO job, into a newly created chief data officer role, with both reporting to COO Javier Olivan (Adweek, July 1, 2026). Schultz's opening assignment is a semantic layer across Meta's data warehouse, which he called a top priority for his next six months (MediaPost, July 2026). Meta sells automated marketing to every advertiser on the platform. It moved its own measurement out from under marketing and gave it a C-level seat.

The two jobs

One is custodian of an asset the company owns. Brand equity, category position, the price premium customers will tolerate. The work compounds and it decays slowly, so no ninety-day window holds enough signal to grade it. Chipotle gave that title to a marketer who ran marketing at Restaurant Brands International for more than seven years and spent eighteen years at Unilever.

The other is the engineer on a number the company has already promised. Bookings, net new ARR, retained revenue, the digital commerce line. It is graded weekly, the instruments are conversion rate, cost per acquisition, and payback, and the person in the chair either hits the plan or explains the variance.

Both are senior roles, and both survive the reorganizations. Spencer Stuart describes the expanded top marketing role as a "CMO-plus" job with a corresponding title change. In hospitality, that is a chief commercial officer over sales and marketing, in software, a chief revenue officer, in retail, a chief customer officer (Spencer Stuart, January 2026). Each of those titles takes one half of the work and drops the other.

The hybrid has stopped being a job. It holds both halves while its only real custody is a budget line. The brand work is real and ungraded, the pipeline work is graded and half-controlled, and when the plan tightens every line that role owns can be cut without breaking a commitment the company has already made.

The Custody Grid

I love a 2x2.  Ask these two questions and plot where you place. What do you have custody of, an asset the company owns or a number it has already promised to the street? And on which clock does the company grade you, the quarter or the cycle?

Four boxes come out of that, and only two of them are jobs anyone is still hiring for.

Asset on the long clock is the brand steward. Number on the quarterly clock is the growth engineer. Those two boxes hold the hiring and the coherent comp structures, and a bad quarter in either one does not end you.

The other two boxes are where most sitting CMOs actually are.

Asset on a quarterly clock is the squeeze. You hold the brand, and you get asked every ninety days what it did for pipeline. The asset moves over eight quarters, and the review happens four times a year, so you arrive at every meeting with an argument where the room wanted a number. Three years of that and the board treats marketing as unmeasurable, then as discretionary.

Number on a long clock is the other failure, and it looks like a promotion. GM moved Norm de Greve out of the CMO seat in November 2025 into the newly created role of chief growth officer, while Lin-Hua Wu took a combined chief communications and marketing officer role that de Greve then reported into (The PR Post, October 2025, Yahoo Finance, May 2026). He announced his departure six months later (MediaPost, May 2026). A growth title with no weekly instrument under it is a title someone can take back.

The hiring already moved

Russell Reynolds tracked more than 14,000 publicly disclosed customer activation and growth appointments over five years. CMO placements fell 28% in 2023. In 2024, CMOs filled 1,215 seats, 24% of all such roles placed globally, while chief sales officer appointments ran up 58% against 2023, chief growth officers 27% and chief revenue officers 17% (Russell Reynolds, April 2025).

The share of the S&P 500 with no chief marketing officer at all is 31%, which Spencer Stuart says is in line with historical averages. That share has held for years. The movement is in the titles around it and in the clock the remaining seat gets graded on. Average CMO tenure in the index is 4.1 years against 5.0 for all C-suite roles at those same companies. At consumer companies, where the brand asset is supposedly the whole business, tenure is shortest at 3.5 years.

The exits are less grim than the tenure number suggests. Of 218 CMOs who left S&P 500 companies between 2021 and 2025, 62% were promoted internally or moved to a similar or bigger job elsewhere, 9% went to a CEO seat, and 13% became a divisional CEO, president, or COO. Of those who left their company, 77% landed somewhere new inside six months.

Which job are you actually in

Each row below is a decision the planning cycle will force on you. The column you belong in is the one where you can answer every row without hedging.

Two caveats sit under the comp row. Take more variable in the brand column only if you also set price. Take less in the growth column only when someone else configures the conversion definitions underneath your number.

If your answer to the custody row is "a budget," you are in neither column. Chipotle, Meta and GM each re-cut that seat since last November, and in every case one half of the work moved to someone else's title. At Meta, the outgoing CMO took a new C-suite seat, and the incoming one joined Zuckerberg's leadership team.

The next ninety days

The pick follows the mechanism that closes revenue at your company. If more than half of revenue closes through a path your team can instrument and change inside a week (self-serve, ecommerce, inside sales, paid acquisition), take the growth branch. If revenue closes through a field sales force, a dealer network or a retail shelf you do not control, take the brand branch, because the growth number will be graded on machinery you cannot touch.

One condition overrides that test. If RevOps or the CRO owns stage definitions and attribution at your company, the growth branch hands you a scoreboard someone else writes, which is the fight I described in The RevOps Land Grab. Take brand in that case, and take pricing with it.

Then make the pick visible before the operating plan closes.

The plan gets one line that names your custody. For the brand steward, that is an asset measure with an eight-quarter baseline and a brand spend floor written as a percentage of revenue. For the growth engineer, it is the revenue line, the driver list, and the headcount to instrument it.

Renegotiate the title in the same meeting as the scope, never in a later one. Asking for both together tells you what the company is prepared to give you.

One page comes out of the board deck. The brand steward replaces the funnel page with eight quarters of asset movement and the price you have been able to hold. The growth engineer leads with the number and the three drivers under it, and moves brand health to the appendix.

Ask your CEO which of the two jobs they think they handed you, and refuse "both" as an answer. Get the answer into the operating plan in writing this fall, with the number or the asset measure attached to your name.