What you need to know:

• While CMO tenure globally has been increasing, marketers continue to exhibit the shortest tenure across the c-suite: 4.3 years to the average 4.9 years of other c-suite leaders, according to latest Spencer Stuart data.
• Across inaugural CMO Awards submissions, tenure was even shorter – 3 years 3 months – while company tenure was a longer 5 year 4 months.
• Yet there were standout examples of marketing and customer chiefs with above average tenure who have the business and commercial impact to prove the worth of their staying power, both in terms of marketing effectiveness, and bolder brand and marketing decision making.
• Three of these leaders – Intrepid’s Leigh Barnes, Kennards Hire’s Manelle Merhi and Patties Foods’ Anand Surujpal – shared how tenure helped drive the impact that earned them finalist and winner status in this year’s CMO Awards in our latest podcast episode.
• All three agree stronger trust, better relationships with the CFO, and a shift from the pursuit of pumping up their own marketing ego to the pursuit of true business alignment and growth have been the positive outcomes from their longer tenure as CMOs.
• It’s also giving them permission to experiment and earn the psychological safety to make the odd mistake. As Surujpal comments: “It's the trust of the organisation that you've got it, as you’ve done this before. You know you're going to get a few things wrong, but you're going to get more things right.”
• The three CMOs also command attention and respect when they know it’s time to go bolder. As Merhi puts it: “I genuinely believe tenure allowed for the trust, for proven capability, for notches on the belt that made people want to sit, listen and be curious in return. They can see I’ve developed and delivered some effective initiatives and strategies before; let's just try and understand where she's coming from.”
• Yet they also agree there’s a risk of getting stale or overconfident if you don’t continue to be curious and challenge your team and category constantly.
• Don’t read this as change for change’s sake, however. Per Barnes: “What we know is the fundamentals of doing the right thing over and over again is actually how you win. Is it easier for customers to book? Do more people know about you? Do they remember you when they go to shop? And are people talking about you? Those are the fundamentals. Those are the fundamentals, yet we get thrown so much stuff from every part of your business… Sometimes our job is to be that calm. What if we just do the right thing time and time again, and get in a better position?”
• Listen to the podcast here.

While the numbers have been improving, CMOs continue to exhibit the shortest tenure across the broader c-suite globally. Spencer Stuart data pins CMO tenure across Fortune 500 companies at 4.3 years against a c-suite average of 4.9 years. But variance is huge: Tellingly, Forrester data shows a 75 per cent variance in average CMO tenure across the industries it tracks, with B2B CMOs recording the lowest average tenure, while B2C record the longest.

Across the inaugural Australian CMOs of the Year finalists and winners, a list including both c-suite level marketers as well as heads of marketing reporting into divisional or other c-suite leaders, average role tenure came in at a much lower 3 years 3 months. Company tenure was much higher however, at 5 years 4 months.

Yet across submissions, several marketing chiefs boasted much longer role and company staying power – and delivered stronger marketing effectiveness case studies for it. Three joined Mi3 in the studio for the latest CMO Awards podcast to reveal how longer tenure has helped them build trust and therefore pursue bolder, more expansive decisions and work: Intrepid’s former chief customer officer and now president of the Americas, Leigh Barnes, Kennards Hire GM of marketing and customer, Manelle Merhi, and Patties Foods’ chief marketing and growth officer, Anand Surujpal.

The trio agreed: Tenure has seen them flip the switch on marketing being about ego and delivering results individually – and often, as unreasonably quickly as you can – to putting the brands and business first. All of them are investing in longer-term opportunities and have the confidence to experiment, fail fast, learn and progress. And as well as sharpening their commercial aptitude, tenure has opened doors to new opportunities they never would have found the handle for without embedding themselves truly as leaders within their respective organisations – from book publishing and a relocation to Seattle in Barnes’ case, to Merhi overhauling sales team go-to-market, and Surujpal taking meat pies to international markets.

From performance to brand: Intrepid Group

“Tenure has enabled me to be real, and that gives me the opportunity to say what I think, say when I'm struggling, say when I don't understand something, be vulnerable,” Barnes comments. “But also, when I'm really confident about something, I can say that with gusto, and the business backs and supports that.”

Barnes, who has been with Intrepid for nearly 15 years and took 14^th spot in this year’s CMOs of the Year list, has spent the last three years orchestrating a transformation of marketing from 90:10 performance-to-brand mix, to 60:40. The results speak volumes: From a $60.7 million loss in 2021 to a $21.8 million net profit, and a $29 million revenue bump from first-time customers in early 2025 alone. The work is instrumental in Intrepid meeting its ambition of becoming a $1.3 billion business by 2030, reaching 600,000 customers annually and reinvesting 1 per cent of its revenue into purpose-led initiatives. It’s also come as Intrepid has transitioned from 60 per cent of business coming from Australia, to 60 per cent now coming from the northern hemisphere, with 65 per cent of business direct-to-consumer, more than double what it was pre-pandemic.

The brand epiphany (and "a punch in the face moment") happened when Barnes returned from a stint leading the business in Canada and North America for five years, he went to the pub and realised none of his friends knew who Intrepid was – despite being in Australia for 30-odd years.

“That pride, added to the reality of speaking to people, really shocked me into action,” Barnes says. “Also, in speaking to the executive team, they probably weren't proud of our marketing, and I think that's really important. As a leader, what's the legacy you're leaving? What's the story you want to tell? This is an extension of your brand, your business and your storytelling, so how do you gain that pride in what you're doing? I think a cocktail of those in my legacy with the company helped me make that decision and push it forward with passion and conviction that probably wasn't going to be able to show in a P&L.

“That's another thing: The trust I'd built up over time. There wasn't a way for me to tell the story about how making this big leap was going to work financially. I knew from all the marketing textbooks it would be better. But being able to tell that story financially? I could do some fake modelling, but I think having that trust and tenure really helped me push that through.”

Kennards: Making the job of marketing easier

Merhi, who worked in the construction industry prior to joining Kennards as head of marketing 12 years ago,  was 25^th in the CMOs of the Year list for both her bold work revitalising the sales team, as well as embedding four key customer personas across the business, leading to its latest wins in the commercial segment. She credits such impact to her tenure and ability to earn trust across the organisation.

“I'm sure I've learned a formula and a model that I could pick up and go to a new organisation with, and apply and potentially develop some wins. But I genuinely believe tenure allowed for the trust, for proven capability, for notches on the belt that made people want to sit, listen and be curious in return,” Merhi says. “They can see I’ve developed and delivered some effective initiatives and strategies before; let's just try and understand where she's coming from.”

For Merhi, “pressing the flesh with frontline staff and kicking tyres, as per the lingo of our industry” – plus a healthy dose of curiosity – led to recognition that the commercial segment was the next growth unlock for Kennards. She both worked with the commercial team to pull together the data, as well as leveraged a “very strong relationship with the CFO” to identify this segment coming to Kennards organically without it having built the operating model and customer experience for it.

“From a brand strategy and a brand experience point of view, it makes you sit up straight and pay attention. And the data was showing us one commercial customer was equivalent to 148 DIY customers. When you start telling internal stories like that, people pay attention. That is basically where we started that journey,” she explains.

One of the most important steps taken was defining the personas and personifying them with names, a look and feel, psychological choice drivers, what motivated them, and rolling that out internally. Today, every Kennards branch and employee speaks the language of customer and these segments, Merhi says proudly.

“Part of the journey was inside out. Then we went outside and tried to bring the market back in,” she continues. “That created real glue between not only what the market started to know about us from a brand story point of view, but how our people then served, identified, and personalised the customer service for them. Now, you could go to almost any branch and mention one of our four personas by name, and they will know exactly who you’re talking to. That’s gold dust.”

Trust was obviously key here, but to earn that, Merhi advises other marketers to leverage the marketing discipline you’re using outside the organisation internally.

“Who’s your internal audience? How do you build their trust? How do you personalise your conversations with your own internal customer segments? And how do you go out and actually visit them so they realise you’re not just sitting in an ivory tower, coming up with campaigns, ideas or initiatives that actually don’t connect with what the frontline staff are feeling with the customers they’re dealing with, day in and day out?” she asks.

Foundations for change: Patties Foods

That willingness to back you because of your proven track record is also helping Surujpal, an eight-year veteran at Patties Foods, to gain buy-in to overhaul recently acquired brand from Vesco Foods, Lean Cuisine. Customer insights showed the brand was dated, seen as less relevant, while the product itself was not meeting expectations. Even overall media choices were suboptimal, he says.

“The thought was 'gosh, does anything work here?' That's effectively where we started, which was about 18 months to two years ago,” says Surujpal. “We have started right from the core to understand what we wanted to keep… we’ve gone through and looked at food up to the packaging, the comms, our claims, creative, media channels. It’s then been having conversations with my partners in the sales team on how we can get this out to trade and the path to purchase.”

The trust he’s built is Surujpal’s foundation for change. “It's the trust of the organisation that you've got it, as you’ve done this before. You know you're going to get a few things wrong, but you're going to get more things right,” he says.

“The relationship between myself, my sales counterparts, my CEO, my CFO, is really strong… they lean on me to get us there and say, we're going to back you. If there's something I think might not work, I'm incredibly transparent and will say, you know what? I'm going to give you this shot because I think it's going to work. And if it's not, I'm going to pivot really fast, try to work the hell out how I got that one wrong and change… it’s the trust that you are shaping it. Brands are organic, they’re always changing and you’re reshaping them all the time.”

A second strategic task confronting Surujpal is taking iconic Patties brand, Four'N Twenty, into international markets – some where the concept of a meat pie isn’t even understood. Here again, the long-term view is critical and again, something tenure has given this CMO in spades.

“You end up having to change the way you think about it. In Australia, we operate at a very emotional level…  We talk about fan food. But as you go out, you’re into functional space and it’s different positioning and how you get through this functional space to gain permission to jump into this emotional space,” Surujpal explains.  

“It's a fascinating journey. But again, the ambition is we’re not doing for the next two years, we're setting this brand up and company up for next 50 years. We’re doing the heavy lifting. There'll be a bunch of marketers a couple of generations from now that'll reap the rewards for this hard work.”

From me to us

Which is where this interesting shift from professional gain to brand and business gain, becomes evident. All three CMOs believe tenure has seen them evolve from marketers out to build their own personal worth, to the ultimate champions of brand as a team sport and putting the business first.

“One of the things I've learned is there are three parts of my job: One is to make sure we're selling, as we need commercial performance day in, day out; ensure we're doing cool stuff for the future and ensuring the brand is positioned to win in five, 10 and 15 years; then whatever my CEO needs me to do,” says Barnes.

All three also reiterate strong relationships with the CFO – something that continues to prove elusive to so many other marketing chiefs (check out episode 4 in the CMO Awards podcast series for some very helpful tips on how to bridge the CMO-CFO gap).

Beating longer tenure risk with curiosity

While all the business textbooks tout many pros when it comes to longer tenure staff – invaluable institutional knowledge, stability and consistency, mentorship and leadership, enhanced productivity, cost savings and better employee morale and loyalty to name a few – there is the danger of becoming overconfident or stuck in your ways. All three CMOs of the Year finalists and winners agree it’s an omnipresent risk and one longer tenured marketing chiefs need to watch out for.

“One of the risks of tenure is the fact you can become stale and you can have a mindset of always having done it this way. Which people in the business will go, we've never done things like this, or it’s just all shiny objects,”  Merhi says. “Part of my own development, and how I try and push the team, is through curiosity, which is not only on the inside; curiosity is ensuring I'm always looking up, looking out and thinking about what might disrupt us. What are the new innovations coming in? How are customers and consumers transacting, behaving and what are they expecting from brands? And how do I bring the new-age type of thinking into the organisation so that the business and the brand stays current and modern?”

Surujpal agrees staying curious and being bold is critical here. “A lot of times we've set the boundaries, and we've pushed it fast because we're leading from a category point of view. So it's ensuring you beat yourself in a lot of cases. Because you are the benchmark and your team has set those goals and targets,” he says.

“The ability to stay curious is something I really talk about with my team standards and having this notion that you have to learn. Mistakes are ok, and you've got to push. Because if you don't, someone else will do it for you. And you won't know where it's going to come from, that's the thing – it may not come from where you think it's going to come from. We push into spaces where we're not supposed to be and people will think, oh gosh, you can't be there, that's not where you're supposed to be. So that's the one thing for me, being able to stay at the forefront.”

For Barnes, the wider challenge every marketer faces is the constant feedback loop – something that can be even harder to bear the longer you oversee a brand, build pride in your efforts, and work within an organisation.

“Because we make and build in public, the feedback can be relentless. I think we don't talk enough about that. For me, particularly, what I've struggled with is the mental health aspects of the marketing role,” he comments. “Every single thing you put out into the world gets critiqued. A social media post goes out, and I will get a message from someone saying it's not good enough or there's an issue with it.

“Some of it is just noisy, and you've got to learn to deal with it, while some of it is really helpful and important. But there is this wealth of information and noise that comes your way, and it can almost feel like you're doing a bad job all the time. I think we've got to look at how we do that and have conversations… you put yourself out there as the heart and soul of the company plus the vision of your brand work, which we spoke about earlier. That's something I just had to learn how to manage over my duration there.”

But rather than worry about staleness, Barnes points to the risk of marketers pursuing too much change, too constantly.

“That is actually an issue in marketing: There's too much stuff that gets thrown at you to change,” he says. “What we know is the fundamentals of doing the right thing over and over again is actually how you win. Is it easier for customers to book? Do more people know about you? Do they remember you when they go to shop? And are people talking about you? Those are the fundamentals, yet we get thrown so much stuff from every part of your business… Sometimes our job is to be that calm. What if we just do the right thing time and time again, and get in a better position?”

That’s not to say Barnes doesn’t recognise the need to remain a change agent for Intrepid. “I've shaken myself up personally – I have moved to another country to do a completely different job, to test myself, and I've encouraged my people and team to move around and take those steps,” he adds.

“It's about the right change and understanding that. That's our job as senior marketers; we can't just get caught up in all the flashy stuff. How do we keep making the right moves so we're better every day, but when you see that opportunity, how do we run and make that happen?”