For three years, the reinvention of the marketing chief into a growth owner has been reshaping the C-suite of America's Fortune 500. Finland's listed-company management teams never carried many CMOs to begin with, yet the same shift is now surfacing on Nasdaq Helsinki, and it arrives as a question for boards and CEOs, not for marketing.
On 15 September 2025, the Chief Marketing and Sustainability Officer role at Rebl Group ended. Among the Chief titles the small-cap group kept was a different one: Chief Growth Officer. Taken alone, it is a single management change at one listed company. Taken against the wider record, it is one of the clearest Finnish instances yet of a shift documented at scale in the United States.
On 7 July 2026, Forrester published its third annual analysis of marketing leadership in the Fortune 500. Marketing executives who sit on the top team or report to the CEO are now found at 52% of F500 companies, down from 58% a year earlier.
The "chief marketing officer" title itself is used by just 36%, down from 49% in a single year. Forrester's Ian Bruce argues the decline reading misses the point: the role is not disappearing, it is being reinvented into chief growth officer, chief commercial officer and chief customer officer, giving one leader accountability for growth across the whole customer lifecycle.
Finland barely had CMOs to lose on the management teams
The temptation is to read this as an American story. Across the 188 companies actively listed on Nasdaq Helsinki and First North, seven have a standalone Chief Marketing Officer (not seven percent, seven companies), and not one of them is a large cap. All 33 Finnish large caps have zero. Where Forrester is tracking the CMO's decline at the top of the US market, the top of the Finnish market had already finished that decline before the story began.
Most senior marketing owner | Companies | Share of 188 |
Standalone Chief Marketing Officer | 7 | 4% |
Chief title with marketing bundled into other functions | 9 | 5% |
Below the Chief line (EVP, SVP, VP, Director, Head) | 24 | 13% |
No one with marketing in a management team title | 148 | 79% |
But the absence of the CMO title is the wrong thing to fix on. The part of the American trend that matters is not the marketing chief leaving; it is where the growth mandate goes next, and who at the top table is made to own the number. On that question, the change is visible in Finland too.
Rebl kept a growth title where a marketing one used to sit. Raute appointed Arto Kaikkola as Chief Commercial Officer effective 5 May 2026, a seat that folds sales, marketing, communications and commercial excellence into a single owner. And the inflow follows the same shape, though not the same title. Of nine senior marketing hires across Finnish listed companies in 2025 and 2026, only one — Framery's acting CMO — holds a marketing-only Chief title. Two more reached Chief level with marketing bundled into something else: sustainability at Gofore, commercial duties at Raute. The remaining six arrived below Chief level entirely, as EVPs, SVPs, VPs or a Director. The new senior marketing hire in Finland rarely gets a Chief title of any kind, let alone a marketing-only one.
Where the CMO title does survive, it clusters among recent arrivals. Companies that listed in 2021 or later carry a standalone CMO at four times the rate of those listed earlier (9% against 2%), and hold any Chief-level marketing seat at more than triple the rate (16% against 5%). But this is not evidence that going public designs the role in: in three of the five recent-listing CMOs the title predates the IPO, so the pattern is really the marketing title fading among long-listed incumbents, not newer companies inventing it. For boards, that is the point. The growth-ownership question is sharpest exactly where most of the market sits, at the long-established companies that have already let the marketing title go.
IPO cohort | Companies | Standalone CMO | Any Chief-level marketing seat |
Listed 2021 or later | 58 | 5 (9%) | 9 (16%) |
Listed before 2021 | 130 | 2 (2%) | 7 (5%) |
Two directions, not one
Here Finland diverges from the American script. The F500 reinvention runs in one direction: marketing consolidates upward into a commercial growth owner. The Finnish record splits in two. Some companies route the function up into a commercial or growth chief, as at Rebl and Raute. Others route it down into communications, the reputation and disclosure seat. Valmet's rebuilt leadership team placed communications inside an EVP for People, Communications and Culture, with no marketing role surviving at the top; around thirty listed companies now carry a senior communications owner whose title has no marketing scope at all.
These are opposite bets rather than two versions of one. Placing the function under a growth or commercial chief treats growth as a revenue-and-customer problem with a single accountable owner. Placing it under communications treats the senior storytelling seat as an investor-and-stakeholder function, with the growth number sitting elsewhere, typically spread across the CEO and sales. In a market as institutionally owned and disclosure-driven as the Nordic one, the pull toward communications is strong.
The question for the board
A Finnish listed-company board appoints and oversees the CEO and signs off on how the company frames its strategy and top team; the CEO builds that team beneath it. So the board's real question is broader than where the marketing title lands: it is whether someone visibly owns growth at all. When a company removes a marketing chief and names a growth or commercial chief in its place, the answer is easy to read. It is harder to read when no growth title exists.
Tokmanni shows how easily that case is misjudged. No executive there holds a marketing, growth or commercial title, which looks at first like an empty seat. But the growth mandate is owned. The CEO leads it; the Swedish Dollarstore segment, the acquisition meant to make Tokmanni "a Nordic leader in the variety discount retail market," sits on the executive team in its own right; and a newly created Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer joins from 1 September 2026. Growth is carried there by geography and strategy, not by a functional label.
That is the boardroom test, and the question is not "do we have a CMO." The data says most Finnish management teams never will. The sharper question: since the company will keep growth under a commercial, strategy or business-unit owner regardless, has the board decided which, and can it name the person who owns the number? What a board should refuse to accept is the outcome where the marketing title goes and nobody, by function, geography or strategy, visibly holds growth in its place.
Forrester's steadiest F500 finding is that once these reinvented leaders are appointed, they are given close to four years to deliver. The American trend is arriving in the Nordics. The question for boards and CEOs is not whether they will have a CMO, but whether they will design who owns growth, or inherit that answer by default.
A note on "CMO." Standalone CMO means the title is exactly Chief Marketing Officer, with nothing else riding along — no CCO, no sustainability. Acting/interim CMOs are considered standalone. "Chief-level marketing seat" is broader: any Chief title where marketing appears alongside something else (Raute's Chief Commercial Officer, Gofore's Chief Marketing and Sustainability Officer). Titles below Chief — EVP, SVP, VP, Director, Head — don't count in either figure, even where marketing is the person's main job. Company counts and headcounts can differ: Framery's two active CMOs (a permanent one since 2018, an acting one since 2025) count as one company but two people. And all of this is scoped to the management team itself — a CMO or marketing lead who sits below that level, however senior their real influence, isn't part of these numbers.
Stay on the pulse, catch the signals
Subscribe to Listeds Leadership Intelligence Platform:
leader and company database access
email alerts
career, boards and interim opportunities