The average CMO tenure in a digital business is twenty-two months. Your board treats this as a talent pipeline problem. It is an organisational design problem and until you name it as such you will keep solving it with better recruitment.
Twenty-two months is not enough time to understand a complex commercial system, design a structural intervention, execute it at sufficient depth to change the underlying performance, and produce results visible enough to satisfy a board that set the expectation at appointment. It is enough time to reorganise the team, renegotiate the agency relationships, launch a new brand campaign, and be judged on metrics that were moving before any of those things happened.
The CMO who lasts twenty-two months did not fail. They ran out of runway inside a structure that was not designed to give them what they needed to succeed. The next CMO will have the same runway and the same structural constraints and the same outcome.
The board that keeps replacing the CMO without examining the architecture the CMO is operating inside is the board spending the most money on the least effective intervention available to it.
What is the structure underneath the role? That is the question that changes the outcome.
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