For luxury conglomerate LVMH, Scotch brand Glenmorangie is a jewel in the crown of its wine and spirits portfolio.
In 2022, the category brought in just over $7 billion in revenue for the French group. Since 2018, Glenmorangie doubled its profits and charted record sales under the leadership of former president and CEO Thomas Moradpour.
When Moradpour departed after five years in the role in July, the Scotch brand turned to its chief marketer Caspar MacRae to fill the top seat. Just a few months in, he’s making his mark with a strategy that builds on his predecessor’s success by bringing a marketing mindset to the top job.
“Marketers can bring a lot of transferable skills from the CMO role to the CEO one,” he told Adweek.
The path from CMO to CEO is a natural one, he added, not least because marketers are naturally oriented to think customer-first but also since they bring a combination of “left-brain, right-brain” skills to the job.
“Marketers understand how important creativity is, but they also understand the desire and need to drive bottom line growth,” he said.
The commercial value of creativity
MacRae is one of a small group of marketers who have made the leap from CMO to boss in recent months.
Mindfulness app Headspace’s Christine Hsu Evans, one of Adweek’s Marketing Vanguard Award honorees, was promoted to president in July, while in 2022 ex-Artsy CMO Everette Taylor was appointed CEO of crowdfunding marketplace Kickstarter.
Though the CMO position has a famously high churn rate, a recent report from executive search firm Spencer Stuart revealed a growing trend of CMOs moving on up.
The annual survey found that 77% of CMOs who left their jobs at one of the top 100 advertisers last year went on to higher-level positions—divisional manager, president or executive vice president, for instance—either within their own organization or at another company.