VP of Marketing or CMO: What the Role Owns and How to Hire

Your top marketer decides how the company finds customers, what it tells them and where the marketing budget goes. Whether you call that person a VP of Marketing or a chief marketing officer, the hire touches the brand, the sales pipeline and the agencies you pay. It is also a hard role to get right, because companies define it in very different ways.

This guide explains what the role owns, how a VP of Marketing differs from a CMO, what public pay data does and does not tell you, and how to run the hire. It includes a one-page brief to write before the search, interview questions and guidance for the first 90 days.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which is mentioned in this article.

What a VP of Marketing or CMO is responsible for

At its core the job is to understand the market and turn that understanding into growth. In most companies the top marketer owns some combination of these:

• Market and customer insight: who buys, why, and what competitors offer them.
• Positioning and brand: what the company stands for and how it says it.
• Demand generation: the campaigns and channels that fill the sales pipeline.
• Product marketing: launches, pricing input and the material the sales team uses.
• The budget, the agencies and the team: where the money goes and who does the work.
• Measurement: which numbers show marketing is working, agreed with the CEO and the sales leader.

The budget alone makes this a senior role. In Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey (opens in a new tab) of 401 marketing leaders, most at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, marketing budgets came to 7.8% of company revenue, and 56% of CMOs said their marketing organization lacked the budget to deliver its strategy.

What varies most is authority. Some marketing leaders set strategy and influence pricing, product launches and sales. Others run communications: advertising, content, social media and events. Both are legitimate jobs. The trouble starts when the company hires for one and expects the other.

Kimberly Whitler and Neil Morgan's 2017 Harvard Business Review article "Why CMOs Never Last (opens in a new tab)" shows what that mismatch looks like. It opens with a retailer whose new CMO expected to set the growth strategy. He found his role "limited mostly to marketing communications", with no responsibility for product launches, pricing or store openings. As he told the authors, the job was poorly designed, with "a mismatch between the CMO's authority and the CEO's expectations".

VP of Marketing or CMO: what the title tells candidates

The title is a choice about level and scope, and companies make it differently. Among Fortune 500 marketing leaders in 2024, Spencer Stuart found (opens in a new tab) that 40% held the plain title chief marketing officer and 16% had marketing plus another function in the title. Another 33% had marketing in the title without the word chief, such as SVP of marketing, and 11% had no "marketing" in the title at all, with words such as commercial, growth, customer, brand or strategy instead.

So a VP can be the most senior marketer in a large company, and a CMO title can cover more than marketing. In its 2026 study of the S&P 500, Spencer Stuart describes "CMO-plus" roles: a chief commercial officer responsible for sales and marketing in hospitality, a chief revenue officer in software, and a chief customer officer in retail who can also oversee retail design and the in-store experience. It also found that 31% of S&P 500 companies had no chief marketing officer. Most of those companies still have a marketing function, but it may sit elsewhere on the org chart, and some run it through regions or business units.

The table below sets out two remits to discuss before you choose the title. It is this guide's recommendation, not a finding from the studies, and a VP can also be the top strategic marketer.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

For a role that shapes company strategy from the executive team, consider a CMO title. For a role that builds and runs marketing under an agreed strategy, consider VP of Marketing. Either way, state the authority and the reporting line in the brief.

What the role pays and how to set the range

The main government source in the US is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (opens in a new tab), and it treats marketing managers as one occupation, with no separate figure for a VP or CMO.

In May 2025 the median annual wage for marketing managers was $166,790. The highest-paid 10% earned more than $293,610. Medians were higher in some industries: $192,600 in information, $172,580 in the management of companies and $172,350 in finance and insurance.

Use these figures as background, not as a price. When you set a range, account for the company's size, revenue and stage, the industry, the location and how much of the business the leader will own, and decide what bonus and equity the package includes. For a real range, use a current compensation survey or an executive compensation adviser for companies of your size and industry, and ask your search firm what recent candidates in similar roles accepted.

Before the search: define the job and what success looks like

Most of the work that makes this hire succeed happens before you speak to a candidate. A common mistake, and one I've made, is to meet someone you like and then work out where they fit. In a 2020 episode on hiring I put it this way: "If you have a great person that doesn't fit within your organization, you're just setting yourself up for a disaster." The fix is to write down what the role is and what the person will be responsible for, then look for someone to fill it.

The second step is easy to skip: a short document that says what success looks like at 90 days. Without it, a new leader has to guess what you want, and you end up frustrated that they are not delivering something you never wrote down.

For a marketing leader, the brief also has to settle the questions behind failed hires like the retailer's above: the authority over pricing and product, the reporting line, the budget and the measures. Tie the role to revenue outcomes the leader will own, such as pipeline or customer acquisition cost. A list of activities tells a candidate what to do; outcomes tell them what you will judge.

Promote from within or hire from outside

Most CMOs in Spencer Stuart's S&P 500 sample had been appointed from within their company. At mid-2025, the study found (opens in a new tab) that 62% of CMOs had been appointed from within and 38% hired externally. Of the external hires, 43% came from a different industry. Across all the CMOs studied, 73% were in their first CMO role.

Two points follow for a CEO. First, look properly at internal candidates before you run an outside search, and decide what an outsider would bring that they cannot. Second, a first-time CMO can still bring substantial leadership experience. Use the interview and the finalist exercise to test whether that experience fits your mandate, alongside the candidate's record and references.

The same study puts average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 at 4.1 years, against 5.0 years for the C-suite as a whole. Of 218 CMOs who left their roles between 2021 and 2025, 62% were promoted or moved to a similar or bigger role elsewhere, and 9% became CEOs. An exit can be a promotion or a lateral move; it does not by itself show that the hire failed.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

How to run the search and judge candidates

1. 1

   Write the brief and agree it with the people the leader will work with

   Share the one-page brief with the sales leader, the finance lead and anyone who will share targets with the new hire. Disagreement about the remit is easier to settle now than after the hire.

2. 2

   Choose how to search

   You can fill a role this senior through your network, an internal promotion or an executive search firm. The CMO search firm guide compares firms, and the fee guide explains how they charge. If you need cover while you search, consider an interim or fractional CMO.

3. 3

   Match the candidate's record to your stage and deal size

   A leader who has run a large brand budget may struggle in a company that needs a pipeline built from scratch, and the reverse is also true. Look for results in a company like yours: similar deal size, sales cycle and stage.

4. 4

   Use the same structured interview for every finalist

   The US Office of Personnel Management describes a structured interview (opens in a new tab) as one that asks candidates systematically about their past behavior or about hypothetical situations, and in which "All responses are evaluated using the same rating scale and standards for acceptable answers". OPM also asks that every candidate gets the same predetermined questions in the same order. Agree the questions and what a strong answer looks like before the first interview.

5. 5

   Ask finalists for a 90-day plan with a real budget

   Give each finalist the same brief and a realistic budget, and ask how they would spend the first 90 days and the money across channels. It shows who thinks about the business and who reaches for a list of tactics.

6. 6

   Take references from the executives who relied on them

   Speak to former CEOs and sales leaders, not only the people the candidate managed. Ask what the candidate's marketing changed in the pipeline and revenue, and what they would hire them to do again.

Choose from these questions to test commercial judgment, team leadership and work with other functions.

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Across the selection research reviewed by Sackett and colleagues, structured interviews had higher corrected mean validity than unstructured interviews. These are correlations with job performance, not percentages of successful hires or a forecast for this particular executive role.doi.org (opens in a new tab)

The first 90 days

Write the 90-day success document before you make the offer, agree it with the new leader in their first week, then review it together at the end of each month.

Expect the agency roster to come up early. I've seen this from the vendor's side. On my podcast in 2021 I talked about "the number of times that we get hired because a new CMO comes in or a new leader comes in." The new leader's view is often that "what was happening here was not working. So a lot of times they go fire the vendors and they hire new ones." That can be the right call. Ask for the review of agencies and channels as part of the 90-day plan, with the reasons written down, so the changes rest on a diagnosis.

By day 90 you should see a clear view of what is working and what is not, a plan and budget for the year that the CEO and the sales leader have agreed, and the first changes to the team or the agencies under way.

If you wrote the brief today, could you say what your new marketing leader would own, and what success looks like after the first quarter?