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Does the CMO Matter? Definitely.

At the 2020 Summer Academic Conference, the Journal of Marketing hosted a special session honoring the 2020 Journal of Marketing/Sheth Foundation Award winning article, “The Chief Marketing Officer Matters!,” and its authors, Frank Germann, Peter Ebbes, and Rajdeep Grewal.

This article resolves previously contradictory findings, using rigorous econometric techniques, to show that the presence of a CMO results in improved firm performance. It also opens up avenues for future research about the marketing leadership antecedents of business performance. The findings are especially timely when many marketing activities are being assumed by non-marketing parts of the firm. The research implies that such re-organizing has potentially deleterious effects. Marketing has its role, and the CMO really does matter!

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Frank Germann of University of Notre Dame

Tarun ChughCEO, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance, India

Alicia Tillman, Global CMO, SAP, USA

Bill Stewart, CMO, Chief Outsiders (and Former CMO of Kmart, Levi-Strauss and Company, and Credit Karma)

The full article is available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1509/jm.14.0244

This session was held as a part of the 2020 AMA Summer Academic Conference. Also available are a series of on demand sessions highlighting interactive software tools for the classroom presented by conference sponsors.