The copycat CMO: firms’ imitative behavior as an explanation for CMO presence

Abstract

The present study adds to the CMO literature the perspective of firms' imitative behavior on why firms have CMOs in their TMT. We propose that a firm's decision to have a CMO on its TMT is driven not only by contingency-reated considerations but also by social ones, as the decision is significantly influenced by industry peers. Empirical findings based on 505 large US firms from 2000 to 2012 indicate that firms' imitative behavior is a significant driver of CMO presence, especially when firm uncertainty is strong and inference uncertainty is low. Post hoc analyses indicate that this imitation behavior tends to be performance neutral at best.

Chief marketing officer presence and firm performance: assessing conditions under which the presence of other C-level functional executives matters

“…Thus, having a seat at the corporate strategy table makes it more likely that the CMO's strategic proposals will be formulated and executed more effectively and efficiently, leading to superior performance (Lehmann 2004;Boyd et al 2010). The accumulated empirical evidence for these arguments (in the nascent empirical CMO research) is a mix of significant and non-significant effects (Nath and Mahajan 2017;Wiedeck and Engelen 2018). Research with strong empirical methodologies and longer, more recent observation windows demonstrates a positive CMO presence-firm performance relationship in line with our arguments (cf.…”

“…Reaffirming the positive CMO presence-firm performance link Our study's fourth theoretical contribution is to the CMO literature, which has reported either positive or null performance effects of CMO presence (Nath and Mahajan 2017;Wiedeck and Engelen 2018). Our results for the main effect of CMO presence (see Model M1's results in Table 3) replicate the positive CMO presencefirm performance relationship (Germann et al 2015).…”

“…Firms employing a CMO are expected to fare better than those that do not because this executive can elevate the marketing concept to corporate-level strategic decision-making (Jaworski 2011). While earlier research reported a mix of positive and non-significant main effects (see summaries by Nath and Mahajan 2017;Wiedeck and Engelen 2018), studies with longer observation windows and robust empirical methods taking selection and endogeneity issues into account have established the benefits of CMO presence (Germann et al 2015;Homburg et al 2014).…”

Executives with customer experience and firm performance in the B2B context

“…Prior studies show that CMO presence helps improve firm performance (Germann et al, 2015;Boyd et al, 2010;Nath and Bharadwaj, 2020) and signals a firm's marketing legitimacy (Homburg et al, 2014) and that marketing experience in the upper echelons helps improve firm growth (Whitler et al, 2018) and market orientation of the firm (Brower and Nath, 2018). Beyond studying the value of marketing expertise in the upper echelons, prior studies also look at other aspects EJM 55,7 and issues surrounding CMOs, such as their compensation structure (Bansal et al, 2017), job turnover (Nath and Mahajan, 2017) and why they are present in the TMT (Wiedeck and Engelen, 2018;Nath and Mahajan, 2008). For a comprehensive review of the TMT literature, interested readers are referred to recent work by Whitler et al (2020) and You et al (2020).…”

Autoencoders for strategic decision support

“…In the strategic management literature the optimal trade-off between differentiation and conformity is referred to as 'optimal distinctiveness' [25]. Empirical examples of mimicking decisions without rational basis include the appointment of CMOs [26]. Even when not outright mimicking, managers draw ideas from the practices of others [3,4].…”