“Elimination of a CMO role is not necessarily a bad thing,” said Richard Sanderson, a consultant at executive search and advisory firm Spencer Stuart. “If the role is expanding to chief customer officer, I view that as a positive outcome for a marketing leader, not a negative.”

Indeed, only around one-third of top marketers at Fortune 500 companies hold the conventional chief marketing officer title, according to numbers from Spencer Stuart. The rest go by something else.