Signals point to the standalone chief marketing officer title continuing to disappear from large US retail org charts, with at least two more top-25 US retailers likely to retire or absorb the seat before the fiscal 2026 reporting season closes in March 2027. The single cleanest test is Target’s marketing seat, vacant since February and re-specced as a combined chief guest experience and marketing officer: the pattern suggests it gets filled as that hybrid rather than restored as a conventional CMO. Three moves in the last five weeks point the same way, and all three hand marketing to an executive who also owns loyalty, personalization and retail media.
This is not a story about marketing losing status. It is a story about where retail profit now sits, and about the fact that the function which monetises shopper data has outgrown the function that buys advertising.
In short
- The prediction: at least two more top-25 US retailers likely retire or absorb the standalone CMO title by March 2027, folding marketing into a customer, revenue or growth seat that also owns loyalty, personalization and retail media.
- Signal 1: Kohl’s created a chief customer officer role on August 25, eliminated the CMO position outright, and gave the new seat to its chief digital officer.
- Signal 2: Best Buy’s July restructure named five executives to the leadership team with no CMO among them, splitting demand into a chief revenue officer and a chief ads and media officer.
- Signal 3: Target’s marketing seat has stayed open for roughly six months and was re-specced as a combined guest experience and marketing role rather than a straight CMO backfill.
- The counter-case: Lowe’s removed its CMO in 2022 and reinstated it in 2024, so title consolidation demonstrably reverses, and a new CEO often wants a marketing chief of their own.
Why this matters now
Retail org charts are usually a lagging indicator. A title changes twelve to eighteen months after the underlying economics have already changed, because boards move slowly and because seats are expensive to unwind. That lag is what makes C-suite structure worth reading as a forecast rather than as gossip.
What makes the current window unusual is density. Three of the largest US general merchandise chains restructured their demand-side leadership inside about six months, and the three restructures rhyme. In each case the surviving seat is broader than marketing, and in each case it includes the assets that generate margin rather than the assets that generate awareness.
The broader base rate supports the read. Per the Spencer Stuart 2025 CMO tenure study, roughly 31% of Fortune 500 companies now operate without a traditional chief marketing officer. UPS, Etsy and Walgreens have all eliminated the role in the past two years. Retail is not leading this trend; it is joining it, and joining it with a particular twist.
That twist is retail media. A general merchandise chain running an advertising business at high incremental margin has a governance problem that a pure marketer cannot solve: the same executive who buys media for the brand is adjacent to the team selling media to suppliers. Consolidating both under one customer or revenue owner is one answer. It is a structurally similar move to splitting the CFO and president roles, which several chains have used to separate capital discipline from operating execution.
The forecasting value here is practical. If the pattern holds, it changes who signs agency contracts, who owns the media profit and loss, who negotiates with suppliers on joint business plans, and which executive an investor should listen to on a results call when the question is about traffic.
Signal 1: Kohl’s eliminated the CMO seat and handed marketing to its digital chief
On August 25, 2026, Kohl’s announced that Arianne Parisi had been named chief customer officer, a newly created position reporting to chief executive Michael J. Bender. The company disclosed the change in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The same announcement confirmed that the chief marketing officer position is being eliminated and that CMO Christie Raymond will depart in September after nine years with the company.
The scope of the new seat is the substantive detail. Per the company’s announcement, Parisi will oversee the omnichannel customer experience across marketing, brand and creative, loyalty, personalization, media, and digital commerce, including Kohls.com and the Kohl’s App. That is not a marketing remit with extra responsibilities bolted on. It is a demand-and-data remit that happens to contain marketing.
The direction of absorption matters more than the consolidation itself. Parisi has been Kohl’s chief digital officer since 2025, having previously served as global chief digital officer at JD Sports Fashion, with earlier digital leadership roles at The Finish Line and Nordstrom and merchandising roles before that. The digital chief absorbed the marketing chief, not the reverse.
Read that against the alternative that did not happen. Kohl’s could have named a CMO with expanded digital oversight, which is the more conventional resolution and the one that preserves the marketing title. It chose the version that does not. The company is mid-turnaround under a chief executive who took the permanent seat after a period of leadership churn, which is precisely the condition under which a board will tolerate a title being deleted.
One caution on this signal: a single filing at a single retailer is a data point, not a trend. Kohl’s has specific reasons to consolidate, including cost, and the elimination of a seat during a turnaround can be as much about headcount as about strategy. It is the combination with the next two signals that gives it weight.
Signal 2: Best Buy rebuilt the demand side with no CMO in the frame
In July 2026, Best Buy named five executives to restructured leadership roles as part of its chief executive transition, with all five reporting to incoming CEO Jason Bonfig. The company framed the restructure around accelerating its evolution as a retail, media and technology company. The appointments took effect immediately.
The demand side was split two ways rather than consolidated into a marketing seat. Patrick McGinnis, previously chief merchandising officer, became chief revenue officer with oversight of merchandising, e-commerce, marketplace and the Best Buy Health arm. Separately, Lisa Valentino was named chief ads and media officer, overseeing the ads and media business including the Best Buy Ads retail media network. Valentino joined Best Buy in 2024 from The Walt Disney Company as president of Best Buy Ads.
Three further seats round out the structure: Frank Bedo as chief strategy and growth officer, Luke Motschenbacher as chief retail and services officer, and Duane Scarboro as chief fulfillment and operations officer. Anne Bramman joined as chief financial officer effective August 19, and Corie Barry steps down as chief executive at the end of October.
Note what is absent from that list. There is no chief marketing officer among the named leadership seats, and the advertising business was given its own C-level owner rather than being placed under a marketer. That is the same underlying logic as the Kohl’s move expressed in a different shape: media is a revenue business, so it reports as one.
The timing is worth flagging for anyone tracking this. Best Buy reports its second quarter on August 27, which will be the first results under the new structure and the first opportunity for management to describe how the ads and media seat is expected to contribute. Analysts watching Best Buy’s second-quarter results should treat any segment commentary on media as the more informative disclosure, ahead of the comparable sales line.
The honest qualification: Best Buy did not eliminate an incumbent CMO the way Kohl’s did. It restructured around a chief executive change and simply did not create the seat. That is weaker evidence of deliberate deletion, but arguably stronger evidence about what a modern retail leadership team is expected to look like when it is designed from scratch.
Signal 3: Target’s marketing seat has stayed open and been re-specced
Target restructured its leadership in February 2026 under chief executive Michael Fiddelke. Cara Sylvester moved from chief guest experience officer to chief merchandising officer, Lisa Roath was promoted to chief operating officer, Jill Sando retired as chief merchandising officer for apparel, accessories and home, and Rick Gomez departed as chief commercial officer. The company launched an external search for a combined chief guest experience and marketing officer.
The specification of that search is the signal, not the vacancy. Target did not go looking for a CMO. It went looking for an executive who owns guest experience and marketing together, which merges the customer-journey remit with the demand-generation remit in a single seat. That is the Kohl’s structure arrived at by a different route.
The duration is the second half of the signal. Trade coverage of major retailer C-suites published in mid-August, roughly six months after the restructure, listed Target’s leadership without a marketing chief. A search that runs six months is either struggling to find the hybrid profile or is not urgent, and both readings support the same conclusion: the company is not treating a standalone marketing chief as a must-fill gap.
Target also added a chief AI officer during the same period, hired from Lowe’s, alongside a senior user experience promotion. The seats being created are data and experience seats. The seat not being filled is the marketing seat.
Two adjacent moves reinforce the read without being part of the core case. Walmart’s chief marketing officer for the US business moved on to run Sam’s Club US, while group-level growth sits with an executive vice president holding a chief growth officer title. Kroger created a chief e-commerce officer seat and a chief data and AI officer seat this year, both new, and neither of them a marketing seat.
What the pattern suggests
Signals matrix
| Company | Date | Move | Marketing lands with | Signal strength |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kohl’s | August 25, 2026 | CCO created, CMO role eliminated, CMO departs September | Former chief digital officer | Strong: explicit deletion, disclosed in an SEC filing |
| Best Buy | July 2026 | Five restructured seats named, ads and media given its own C-level owner | Chief revenue officer and chief ads and media officer, split | Moderate to strong: designed from scratch, no CMO created |
| Target | February 2026, still open August 2026 | Search launched for a combined guest experience and marketing officer | Unfilled hybrid seat | Moderate: intent is clear, outcome not yet observable |
| Walmart | 2026 | US CMO moved to run Sam’s Club US; group growth under a chief growth officer | Chief growth officer | Supporting: consistent, but not a deletion |
| Kroger | March to September 2026 | New chief data and AI officer and chief e-commerce officer seats created | No new marketing seat created | Supporting: shows where new seats are going |
The three primary signals are independent events at three different companies with three different chief executives, and they resolve the same organisational question in the same direction. That is the definition of a pattern worth forecasting from, as distinct from three outlets covering one press release.
The common structural feature is that the surviving seat owns first-party data. Loyalty, personalization, digital commerce and retail media are all data-dependent, all measurable, and all attached to margin. Brand and creative are attached to none of those things in a way a finance function can easily audit. When a retailer consolidates, the data-owning function wins because it can defend its budget in the language the CFO uses.
A second feature is that all three restructures happened during or immediately after a chief executive transition or turnaround. New chief executives redraw org charts because that is the cheapest available lever in the first year, and because inherited seats carry inherited politics. Given how many US retailers changed chief executives in 2026, the supply of restructuring opportunities over the next two quarters is unusually high.
A third feature is the pull from the sell side of retail media. If a chain is building an advertising business, that business needs a leader whose incentives are revenue, not brand health. Best Buy resolved this by creating a dedicated ads and media seat. Kohl’s resolved it by putting media inside the customer seat. Both are consistent with the wider shift toward brands pulling retail media planning in house, which raises the sophistication of the counterparty a retailer’s media team has to face.
Putting those together, the base rate for further consolidation looks high rather than speculative. Roughly a third of large US companies already run without the title, three major chains just moved, and the trigger condition (leadership change) is widespread. A forecast of at least two more top-25 US retailers making the move by March 2027 is a modest extrapolation, not an aggressive one.
Wider context: the retail media profit and loss is pulling the org chart
Retail’s profit mix has moved faster than its reporting has. A growing share of operating profit at large chains now comes from advertising, membership fees, marketplace commissions and data licensing rather than from the gross margin on goods sold. Those lines behave like software, with high incremental margin and low incremental cost, and they respond to different management than a merchandising business does.
That mix shift is already forcing disclosure changes, and the pressure on retailers to name non-merchandise income as a named line is running roughly in parallel with the org chart changes described here. The two are the same phenomenon observed through different instruments: one through the income statement, one through the leadership page.
There is a governance dimension that rarely gets discussed openly. A retailer selling advertising to the same suppliers it negotiates trade terms with is managing an inherent tension, and where that business reports determines how the tension is handled. Placing media under a revenue or customer officer who also owns loyalty data gives the retailer one accountable owner for the whole shopper relationship. It also concentrates a great deal of leverage in one seat.
For agencies and brand marketers, the practical consequence arrives sooner than the strategic one. The person who signs a retail media agreement, the person who approves a joint business plan, and the person who owns the retailer’s own brand spend are increasingly the same person. That changes negotiating dynamics in ways that do not favour the supplier.
None of this means brand-building disappears as a discipline. It means the discipline reports to someone whose scorecard is revenue, and that the executive representing it in the boardroom is likely to be someone whose career was built in digital or commercial roles rather than in creative ones.
Implications for retailers, brands and investors
For retailers, the practical question is what the consolidated seat is actually accountable for. A customer or revenue officer who owns loyalty, personalization, media and digital commerce has a wide span and a mixed scorecard. The failure mode is that brand investment gets starved because it is the only component without a clean attribution model, which typically shows up two to four years later in weakening unaided awareness rather than in the next quarter.
For brands and suppliers, the near-term consequence is counterparty consolidation. Where three conversations previously ran in parallel (media, loyalty and merchandising), one executive increasingly arbitrates all three. Suppliers should expect joint business plans to be negotiated as a single package and should expect less room to trade one lever against another.
For agencies, the addressable buyer changes. Retail marketing budgets increasingly sit with executives whose background is digital, commercial or e-commerce rather than brand, and whose default question is incrementality. Pitches built on creative distinctiveness alone will find a colder room than pitches built on measured contribution.
For investors, the useful signal is which seats a retailer creates rather than which ones it fills. A chain that creates a chief ads and media officer or a chief customer officer is telling you where it expects incremental profit to come from, roughly a year before the segment disclosure catches up. The same reading applies to the wave of chief AI officer appointments across large retailers, which is best read as a capability declaration rather than as a hiring story.
For marketing leaders personally, the career implication is direct. The seats being created require a profile that combines demand generation with data, commerce and profit and loss ownership. The candidates winning them, on the evidence of the last five weeks, are coming from digital and commercial roles, not from classical brand marketing.
Caveats: what could go wrong
Prior precedents and how they resolved
| Company | Action | Year | How it resolved | Lesson for the forecast |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lowe’s | Removed CMO, marketing placed under chief merchandising officer | 2022 | Role reinstated in 2024 | Consolidation reverses; treat any single move as provisional |
| UPS | Eliminated the CMO role | Past two years | Not reinstated to date | Deletion can be durable outside retail too |
| Etsy | Eliminated the CMO role | Past two years | Not reinstated to date | Marketplace economics favour a growth or product owner |
| Walgreens | Eliminated the CMO role | Past two years | Not reinstated to date | Distress accelerates consolidation |
| Nvidia | Hired a first-ever CMO | 2026 | Seat created, not deleted | The title is not dying universally; category matters |
The Lowe’s precedent is the one that should temper confidence most. A retailer removed the title, ran without it for roughly two years, then brought it back. That is a complete round trip inside the horizon of this forecast, and it is a reminder that org charts are reversible in a way that, say, a closed distribution centre is not.
The strongest counter-argument is the Lowe’s round trip. A retailer removed the CMO title in 2022, ran marketing under merchandising, and reinstated the role in 2024. If consolidation degrades brand performance quickly enough to be noticed, the correction is cheap and fast, and this forecast would look wrong within its own horizon.
The second counter-argument is that chief executive transitions cut both ways. Best Buy’s incoming chief executive takes over from November, and new leaders frequently want a marketing chief of their own choosing. The same restructure that removed the seat can restore it eighteen months later under a different signature.
The third is that the title is demonstrably not dying everywhere. Nvidia hired its first-ever CMO in 2026. Pinterest named a new CMO in January. Chipotle appointed a chief brand officer. In categories where brand is the primary moat, the seat is being created, not deleted, so any general claim about the death of the CMO is too broad to be useful.
The fourth is attribution. Some of these consolidations are cost-driven rather than strategic. Target confirmed several hundred additional layoffs alongside its restructure, and eliminating a C-level seat during a cost programme is a budget decision that happens to look like a strategy decision. If the driver is cost, the pattern will not persist once cost pressure eases.
The fifth is sample size and selection. Three chains is a thin base for a general claim about US retail, and the three chosen are all general merchandise or department store formats under pressure. Grocery, off-price, warehouse club and specialty retail may resolve the same question differently, and evidence from those formats is not yet in hand.
A final measurement problem is worth naming. Titles are noisy: a company can rename a CMO a chief customer officer with no change in scope, or keep the CMO title while quietly moving loyalty and media elsewhere. Anyone testing this forecast should check the scope described in the announcement, not just the title on the leadership page.
How to check this prediction
The forecast is falsifiable on two legs, and both can be checked from public sources by the end of March 2027.
- The count. Do at least two additional top-25 US retailers announce the elimination, absorption or hybrid re-specification of the chief marketing officer seat between now and the close of fiscal 2026 reporting in March 2027? Announcements typically appear in an 8-K, a corporate newsroom post, or a leadership page change.
- The Target test. Is Target’s marketing seat filled as a combined chief guest experience and marketing officer, or restored as a standalone CMO? A standalone CMO appointment would be direct evidence against the thesis.
Two secondary markers are worth tracking. First, whether newly announced seats include loyalty, personalization and retail media in their stated scope, since scope is what distinguishes a real consolidation from a rename. Second, whether any retailer that consolidated in 2025 or 2026 reinstates a standalone CMO, which would replicate the Lowe’s pattern and would materially weaken the case.
On balance, the evidence supports the forecast without making it safe. The base rate is high, the trigger conditions are widespread, and three independent moves in five weeks point one way. The reversal precedent is real, which is why the prediction is framed as likely rather than certain.
Frequently asked questions
Is the chief marketing officer role actually disappearing?
Not universally, and the broad framing overstates it. Per the Spencer Stuart 2025 CMO tenure study, roughly 31% of Fortune 500 companies operate without a traditional CMO, which means about two thirds still have one. The more accurate description is that the title is being reallocated in categories where first-party data and retail media drive profit, while it is being created in categories where brand is the moat.
What exactly did Kohl’s announce on August 25?
Kohl’s named Arianne Parisi to a newly created chief customer officer role reporting to chief executive Michael J. Bender, with scope covering marketing, brand and creative, loyalty, personalization, media, and digital commerce including Kohls.com and the Kohl’s App. The company simultaneously eliminated the chief marketing officer position, with CMO Christie Raymond departing in September. The change was disclosed in a filing with the SEC.
Why does it matter that the digital chief absorbed marketing rather than the reverse?
Direction of absorption indicates which capability the board considers load-bearing. A CMO given expanded digital oversight would suggest marketing remains the organising principle. A digital chief given marketing suggests the organising principle is the customer data and commerce stack, with marketing as one input among several.
Could this just be cost-cutting dressed up as strategy?
Partly, and that is the most credible deflation of the thesis. Eliminating a C-level seat reduces cost, and at least one of these restructures ran alongside a broader layoff programme. The counterweight is that Best Buy created a new C-level ads and media seat in the same restructure, which adds cost rather than removing it, so cost alone does not explain the shape.
What would prove this prediction wrong?
Target filling its marketing seat as a standalone chief marketing officer would be direct evidence against it. So would fewer than two additional top-25 US retailers making the move by March 2027, or any retailer that consolidated in 2025 or 2026 reinstating a standalone CMO within the horizon, which would replicate the Lowe’s reversal.
Does this mean brand marketing budgets get cut?
Not mechanically, but the risk is real and it is slow-moving. When brand sits inside a seat scored on revenue and incrementality, the component with the weakest attribution model tends to lose budget arguments over time. The effect typically shows up in unaided awareness and search demand over several years rather than in a single quarter, which is precisely why it is hard to govern.
How does retail media change the reporting line?
A retail media network sells advertising to the same suppliers the retailer negotiates trade terms with, so the reporting line determines how that tension is managed. Best Buy gave ads and media a dedicated C-level owner. Kohl’s placed media inside the customer seat alongside loyalty and personalization. Both approaches put media closer to revenue accountability than to brand stewardship.
Are grocers following the same pattern?
Not yet, or at least not visibly. The new seats created at large grocers in 2026 have been e-commerce, data and AI, and people roles rather than consolidated customer or marketing seats. That may reflect a different profit mix, or simply a lag, and it is one reason to treat this forecast as scoped to general merchandise and department store formats rather than to all of US retail.
What should a supplier or agency do differently right now?
Map the actual scope of the retailer seats you sell into, rather than relying on titles, and identify who now arbitrates media, loyalty and trade terms together. Where those three have consolidated into one executive, expect package negotiation rather than parallel tracks, and prepare incrementality evidence as the default currency of the conversation.
Three independent restructures in five weeks resolved the same question the same way: marketing is being folded into a seat that owns the customer data and the media revenue attached to it. The pattern suggests at least two more top-25 US retailers make the same move before fiscal 2026 reporting closes in March 2027, with Target’s vacant seat the clearest single test. The Lowe’s reversal is the reason to hold the forecast loosely, and the reason to watch scope rather than titles.
Primary source for the Kohl’s disclosure: Kohl’s Corporation 8-K filings on SEC EDGAR.