The CMO Club

The CMO Club was a membership community for chief marketing officers, founded in the mid-2000s by Pete Krainik and built on peer-to-peer problem solving among senior marketers with vendors and press kept out of the room. It ran local chapter dinners and roundtables, an annual awards summit, and an online member community. At the point Salesforce acquired it in March 2020 it had more than 650 members across more than 30 chapters worldwide. Salesforce said members could expect the same independence, but discontinued the club in March 2023 during a wider round of internal cuts. The community was then renamed Club CMO and merged with Brand Innovators, a marketing-events business, and has since been folded into the InspireCIO/InspireCXO Leadership Network as InspireCMO, which runs member-led chapter programmes for CMOs with a dedicated executive director, virtual strategy calls, quarterly benchmarking surveys and an online community app. Membership terms and fees have never been published at any stage.

How it works

Historically, members joined a local chapter and attended intimate dinners and roundtables closed to vendors and press, supplemented by an online community and an annual awards event. The successor InspireCMO follows a member-led chapter model with an executive director assigned to each community, cross-chapter attendance rights, regular virtual sessions and quarterly benchmarking surveys. Admission runs through an interest form and a conversation with the executive director.

Typical member

Members were CMOs and senior marketing leaders at large consumer and business brands. The club's defining rule was that vendors and press were excluded, so members could speak without being sold to or quoted.

This entry is mainly of historical interest: the brand a researcher is likely searching for no longer exists. The through-line worth recording is what happened after 2020 - a corporate owner bought a peer community, promised independence, shut it three years later, and the community had to be reassembled twice under new owners. That is a live risk in any vendor-owned executive network and it is the reason members of such groups pay attention to who holds the entity. The current successor, InspireCMO, sits inside a network built around the CIO community and the ORBIE awards, and it is sponsor-supported, which is a different arrangement from the original club's vendor-free positioning. Nothing about the current membership size, chapter list or price is published, so a prospective member has no way to assess it without a call.

Editorial analysis by Peer Group Guide editors. It is separated from the record above and follows the editorial policy.