For the better part of a decade, CPG companies hired marketers who could optimize a media plan. Now, they’re hiring ones who can save a brand.
When Smuckers went looking for a new CMO earlier this year, it didn’t reach for a performance marketer. It hired Katie Williams, the former U.S. CMO of Haleon, a consumer health veteran who spent her career building brands like Advil, Sensodyne and Centrum. Hormel, which had never had an enterprise-wide CMO before, created the role in December and filled it with Jason Levine — a Mondelēz lifer who ran marketing for Oreo and Ritz. Burger King’s new CMO Joel Yashinsky, poached from Applebee’s in early 2025, promptly fired the brand’s mascot, launched a brand reset built on customer feedback and described the whole thing as “not a marketing campaign” but a fundamental rethink of what the brand stands for.
These aren’t the profiles CPG was chasing five years ago. Through the early 2020s, as the platforms grew and retail media exploded, marketing functions were rebuilt in their image. Programmatic fluency, conversion optimization and attribution modeling — the credentials that got people hired started to look less like brand stewardship and more like sophisticated media buying. The logic was sound enough. Digital spending was growing exponentially, quarter-by-quarter ROI pressure was real, and the ability to prove that marketing worked had never been more valued. The problem, as it turned out, was that proving marketing worked and actually building a brand were not always the same thing.
“The category-wide rush to performance at the expense of awareness was a classic example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” said Scott Shamberg, president and CEO at indie media agency Mile Marker. “Everything became about the lower funnel and we heard people start saying all media is performance. CPG was probably the vertical most guilty of that because of the advent of lower funnel advanced metrics.”
The shift was visible in the job titles themselves. In 2019, Unilever scrapped the CMO role entirely when Keith Weed departed after nearly a decade, replacing it with a new position — chief digital and marketing officer — and putting “digital” first in the title by design. Kimberly-Clark went a step further, combining the marketing and digital functions into a single role, chief marketing officer and chief digital officer, held by one executive. And when the industry started asking what marketing was actually for, many companies landed on a telling answer: growth. According to Boston Consulting Group’s benchmark of major CPG players, nearly 70% of company leaders said they had a chief growth officer or equivalent role — one whose responsibilities extended beyond traditional marketing to include insights, innovation, digital commerce and net revenue management. The CMO, in other words, had been quietly rebranded out of existence.
Fast forward to now, and the pendulum has swung. The same companies that spent the better part of a decade subordinating brand to performance are discovering that consumers don’t feel anything when they see their products — and that no amount of attribution modeling fixes that.
“CPG CMOs are navigating multiple social media channels, new platforms like ChatGPT and connected TV, and retail media networks,” said Greg Carlucci, senior director analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice. “All creating more fragmented lanes to operate on. This reduces the competitive advantage CPG’s enjoyed historically but now presents opportunities for mid- to small-tier brands to capitalize on.”
The math has caught up with them. Since 2023, total shareholder returns for the world’s largest food and beverage CPG companies have declined by roughly 7%, even as the broader S&P 500 expanded by 9%. Volume growth across the sector is running at under 1% annually. Private label dollar sales last year grew nearly three times faster than branded equivalents.
What those numbers describe is a decade of decisions coming due. CPG companies built their marketing functions for a world where pricing power was strong and digital channels made everything measurable. Brand equity was hard to quantify, conversion rates were not. Now, pricing has reverted, volumes are stagnant and shoppers — 61% of whom, per McKinsey, say price matters more to them today than it did two years ago — are making sharper trade-offs about what a brand is actually worth to them. The performance marketing era didn’t destroy CPG brands. It just left them with less to fall back on when the condition that had been doing the work changed.
“For the last handful of years, CPG optimized for what was measurable,” said Maija Hoehn, CMO at independent marketing agency broadhead. “What we’re seeing now is a correction toward what actually drives growth: brands that mean something to people, not just ones that convert efficiently.”
None of this is a clean rejection of performance marketing. The better framing is a rebalancing — an acknowledgement that the industry over-rotated, and that brand equity, once depleted, is genuinely hard to rebuild. Hormel didn’t create a CMO role because it had too much brand strength, Smuckers didn’t go external for a consumer health marketer because its media plan needed fixing. Burger King didn’t hire a 20-year quick-service veteran because its numbers were strong — same store sales had just turned negative in Q1 2025 when Yashinsky came aboard.
What they’re all hiring for is the same thing: someone who understood what the brand was for, not just how to spend behind it.
“I think connected television is the channel for CPG that has built the bridge between lower funnel and top of funnel, allowing them to rethink how to do both and still measure how the brand is viewed,” said Shamberg. “Consumers will always have a strong affinity for brands, and marketers have to take that into consideration when they tell their story and when they select the people who will tell them.”
Numbers to know
76%: Percentage by which ChatGPT U.S. unique visitor count grew year-over-year (between January 2025 and 2026).
16%: Percentage of full-time staff that Snap laid off as the company invests in AI.
$50,000: The new lower minimum commitment required to join the OpenAI ChatGPT ad pilot.
100 million: Total number of global streaming households for Roku.
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