Does Starbucks Need a Chief Marketing Officer?

Starbucks promoted its current global chief marketing officer (CMO), Brady Brewer, to the role of CEO of Starbucks’ international business, consequently becoming the latest in a number of companies to eliminate the CMO role.

Instead of replacing the top marketing job, Starbucks is appointing regional CEOs backed by “regional marketing support” to tailor marketing and messages at local levels. Starbucks is also creating two new marketing roles:

• An EVP, chief merchant and product officer “focused on global product strategy, developing new products and growth platforms.”
• A global brand creative leader expected to guide the chain’s global brand identity, overseeing collaborations within arts, design, architecture, fashion, publishing, and music.

The organizational realignment comes after the chain last November introduced a “Triple Shot Reinvention” growth plan that includes expanding its store footprint to 55,000 by 2030, up from 38,000 currently, driven largely by expansion in China and other underserved overseas markets. It also calls for doubling its 75 million global Starbucks Rewards members within five years.

Laxman Narasimhan, Starbucks’ CEO, said, “Consistent with our ambitions, we are realigning the organization to balance clear geographical focus with investing in functional capabilities to scale around the world, generating productivity and reinvigorating our partner culture.” 

Starbucks is not the only company to make organizational changes recently. UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens have decided to eliminate the CMO role over the last few months, building on moves in recent years by Lowe’s, Hyatt Hotels, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Uber, and Lyft to ditch the role.

According to Adweek, “Starbucks’ move to ditch the CMO position comes as many brands are rethinking where the now nebulous role sits within their business, changing the title to reflect a broader range of responsibilities, hiring ‘fractional’ CMOs in consulting-style positions and, in some cases, cutting it entirely.”

Recent analysis from Spencer Stuart found that 27% of Fortune 500 companies don’t have a CMO role.

Jimmy Yar, chief detective at The Talent Detective, believes Starbucks’ realignment of its marketing structure reflects an increased emphasis on the “think global, act local” mantra. He told Marketing-Interactive, “With high growth regions such as APAC where countries are far less homogenous than North America and Europe, the decentralization to regional marketing to help drive growth becomes the order of the day.”

An Ad Age article noted that marketing-adjacent roles, such as chief customer officer, are replacing CMOs, particularly for retailers, “as the companies look to put customers at the forefront of all of their marketing decisions, including loyalty programming.”

A Fortune article from January on the trend of the CMO role being forsaken explained that the rise of “martech” (or marketing technology), which supports data-driven digital marketing, has made the role “more algorithmically driven, full of customer insights, and so mission critical that it also falls under other C-suite executives’ remit.”