Specialist, Generalist, or Both? How Chief Marketing Officers’ Career Experiences Shape the Pace of Service Innovation

The role of chief marketing officers (CMOs) for service innovation has mostly been overlooked in empirical research. Particularly unclear is how CMOs’ personal career choices and experiences shape their firms’ pace of service innovation. We address this issue by examining whether and when specialist CMOs (with a limited variety of career experiences) and generalist CMOs (with a wide variety of career experiences) influence service innovation outcomes, arguing for a “sweet spot” of career variety, that is, a mix of specialist and generalist experiences being most beneficial. We introduce CMOs’ (1) strategic, (2) financial, and (3) operational discretion as important contingencies for the CMO–service innovation relationship. Drawing on service innovations introduced between 2009 and 2020 by 209 US firms included in the S&P 500, we find support for the sweet-spot hypothesis: Adding generalist experiences to specialized insights increases the pace of service innovations, but only up to an inflection point. Service innovation in stable industries, in which CMOs’ strategic discretion is reduced, benefits from specialists. However, the effects of career experiences are attenuated when financial and operational discretion decrease, as CMOs have less leeway to realize their service innovation ideas.