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A new study finds CMO tenures shrinking under multiplying demands, Reese's launches a multichannel Halloween activation, and midsize brewers rethink marketing as Americans drink less.
CMO instability is reshaping FMCG strategy from the top down. Plus, Reese's shows how to own a seasonal moment — and what midsize brewers are doing as the beer category contracts.
In this episode:
The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Morning — we've got a good one lined up today.
Klara: We do. First, we're looking at why CMO tenures are getting shorter just as the job gets harder.
Marco: Then Reese's and a Halloween campaign worth studying — multichannel done right.
Klara: And we finish with midsize brewers rethinking their whole marketing approach as Americans drink less.
Marco: Let's dig in.
Marco: The average CMO — the most senior marketing leader at a company — is spending less and less time in the role before moving on or being pushed out.
Klara: It used to be that a CMO would have three, four, maybe five years to actually build something. A strategy, a team, a point of view on the brand. That runway has been shrinking for years, but a new study out this week puts hard numbers behind what a lot of people in the industry have been feeling for a while.
Marco: The study describes the role as a pressure cooker. CMOs are now expected to run performance marketing — that's the short-term, measurable, click-and-buy kind of advertising — while also building long-term brand value, getting fluent in data analytics, and integrating AI into how their teams work. All at once. That's four very different jobs rolled into one.
Klara: And the result is that tenure — the time a CMO actually stays in post — keeps shrinking. Which creates a real problem for brands. Consumer trust builds slowly. Brand equity, meaning how much goodwill and recognition a brand has earned over time, takes years to accumulate. But if your top marketing leader changes every eighteen months or two years, your strategy keeps resetting.
Marco: For brand managers lower down the organisation, this is genuinely disruptive. Every new CMO brings a new framework, new priorities, sometimes a completely different agency. The people actually running the day-to-day brand work spend half their energy adapting upwards instead of building outwards.
Klara: Though I'd argue the pressure isn't just internal. Boards and CEOs are demanding faster results. So until that expectation changes at the very top, shortening tenures are probably a symptom, not the cause.
Marco: A fair distinction. The fire starts in the boardroom.
Klara: Worth remembering next time a CMO gets blamed for a strategy that never had time to land.
Marco: Moving on — our next story is waiting.
Marco: Reese's has built its entire Halloween campaign around a single question: which street in America is the most trick-or-treat worthy?
Klara: Halloween is the single biggest moment in the confectionery calendar. In the weeks leading up to October 31st, shoppers are actively deciding which sweets to buy — and every brand is fighting for that basket. Whoever owns the cultural conversation around Halloween has a real edge on the shelf.
Marco: So Reese's — which is a Hershey brand, competing directly with Mondelēz and Mars in the confectionery aisle — launched a multichannel campaign kicking off at the start of October, right as the Halloween purchase window opens. The mechanic is simple: they're asking the public to nominate America's most trick-or-treatiest street. That participatory element — get consumers to submit, vote, debate — is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Klara: And this is where it gets interesting for European brand teams. What Reese's is really doing is using community involvement to generate earned media. Earned media means coverage and conversation you didn't pay for directly — people sharing, journalists writing about it, social posts. That's far more powerful than a standard TV spot because it feels like something happening in the real world, not just an ad.
Marco: The channel mix matters too. This isn't one ad in one place. It's a joined-up effort across multiple touchpoints, which means every channel reinforces the same idea.
Klara: My slight hesitation is that this kind of campaign travels better in the US than in Europe. Halloween in France or Germany still doesn't carry the same cultural weight it does in the UK or Ireland.
Marco: True — but the mechanic is completely replicable. Any seasonal moment, any country. The structure is what's worth borrowing.
Klara: Pick your moment, build participation around it, let consumers do the talking.
Marco: Our third story is up next.
Marco: American adults are drinking less beer — and midsize brewers are tearing up their marketing playbooks to figure out what comes next.
Klara: For decades, beer marketing operated on a simple assumption: the category grows, you fight for your share of that growth. Midsize brewers — the ones sitting between small craft producers and the giants like AB InBev — built their strategies around volume. Sell more pints, reach more occasions, grow the base.
Marco: That assumption no longer holds. The moderation trend — consumers actively choosing to drink less, or not at all — has created a structural decline in volume across the US beer market. It's not a blip. It's a reset. And midsize brewers are caught in a particularly uncomfortable position, squeezed from below by craft brands with strong identity and from above by macro giants with deep pockets.
Klara: So what are they actually doing differently? They're shifting away from campaigns built around frequency — how often you drink — and moving toward identity and occasion. What kind of person drinks this beer? In what moment? That's a fundamentally different creative brief.
Marco: And that's the case study worth watching. When volume growth disappears, marketing has to earn its place differently. You can't just ride the wave anymore. You have to give people a reason to choose you when they're drinking less overall.
Klara: I'd add a note of caution here, though. Repositioning a brand around identity takes time — and we just spent twenty minutes talking about what happens when marketing leaders don't have enough of it. A strategy that needs three years to land won't survive an eighteen-month CMO tenure.
Marco: Which is why the brands most likely to get this right are the ones where the boardroom has already accepted that volume is gone — and is genuinely patient about what replaces it. That's a cultural shift, not just a marketing one.
Marco: Today's thread — the brands and leaders that are surviving right now are the ones who know exactly what they stand for, even when the pressure is on.
Klara: So pick one thing your brand owns completely — a season, a ritual, a feeling — and ask whether you're doing enough with it.