Kohl's Creates Chief Customer Officer to Merge Marketing, Digital

What happened

Kohl's has created a new Chief Customer Officer role that consolidates marketing, digital commerce, loyalty and media functions under a single executive, according to Retail Dive. The reorganisation coincides with the departure of Christie Raymond, who has served as the retailer's Chief Marketing Officer.

The move brings together several previously separate disciplines — brand and media, loyalty programmes, and digital commerce — into one unified leadership position, signalling a shift in how the department store chain intends to organise its customer-facing operations going forward.

Why it matters

Retailers have long struggled with fragmented ownership of the customer journey, where marketing, loyalty and digital commerce teams often operate in silos with separate budgets, KPIs and reporting lines. By folding these functions under one Chief Customer Officer, Kohl's is signalling an intent to manage the end-to-end relationship with shoppers — from acquisition and brand messaging through to loyalty engagement and the digital point of sale — as a single, coherent system rather than a set of disconnected initiatives.

This kind of structural consolidation tends to matter most in moments when a retailer is trying to sharpen its value proposition or respond to competitive pressure. Centralising decision rights over media spend, loyalty investment and digital experience under one leader can shorten the distance between strategy and execution, though it also concentrates significant organisational risk and expectation on a single hire.

The Renascence take

Titles are not strategy, and combining functions on an org chart doesn't automatically fix the underlying friction between marketing, loyalty and commerce teams — it simply removes the excuse for that friction to persist.

The real test isn't whether Kohl's has a Chief Customer Officer — it's whether that person is given genuine authority over budget, data and incentives across the functions now reporting to them. Most "unification" reorgs quietly fail because the underlying systems — separate loyalty platforms, separate media dashboards, separate P&Ls — never get merged, so the new title ends up coordinating meetings rather than owning outcomes. A customer-obsessed retailer should treat this appointment as a forcing function: consolidate the metrics first, and let the org chart follow the data, not the other way round.