The chief marketing officer is being taken apart. Some of the work moves to a chief commercial officer, some to a chief growth or customer officer, some to a fractional hire who is in the building two days a week. Spencer Stuart's 2026 study found 31% of S&P 500 companies have no CMO at all, a share in line with historical norms, so the function is not disappearing. It is being redistributed from the shortest-tenured chair in the C-suite to several new ones. The open question is what happens to reputation when the seat that used to hold it is split across three people and a contractor.
Reputation has no obvious home
Reputation was never only marketing's job, but it usually landed there. The CMO owned the brand, the brand owned the narrative, and the narrative sat close enough to reputation that nobody argued. Unbundle the seat and that quiet arrangement breaks. A chief commercial officer is measured on pipeline. A growth lead is measured on acquisition cost. Neither is measured by what the brand name returns on page one, nor by how an AI engine describes the company to a buyer who never visits the site. Reputation falls into the space between the new titles, and that space does not get staffed.
Fractional makes it worse, then better
A fractional marketing leader first sharpens the problem. Two days a week buys campaigns and positioning, not the slow entity work that reputation runs on. The fractional hire is often gone before a Wikipedia dispute resolves or a review cluster turns. The same constraint can force clarity, though. A part-time leader has no room to absorb reputation by default, so someone has to name it as a deliverable with an owner and a budget. A full-time CMO can let it drift inside the role. A fractional one cannot, which is why the engagements that take reputation seriously tend to write it down early.
Name an owner, even without the title
The fix does not require restoring the CMO seat. It requires naming who owns the branded search result, the review trend, the entity record, and the AI answer, whatever that person is called. Give the work a baseline and a named owner on day one. The companies that handle the unbundling well assign reputation on purpose rather than hoping it stays attached to a chair that no longer exists. The title is optional. The owner is not.
Related reading: The New CMO's First Reputation Baseline | Reputation Is the Shortest Job in the C-Suite | Full-Time vs. Fractional vs. Agency-Supported CRO