Compare the Market creates customer and brand chief roles in marketing restructure

Compare the Market has restructured its marketing leadership, creating customer and brand chief roles to ensure its two senior marketers positions are “really explicit”.

Tom Wallis’s role has changed from chief revenue officer to chief customer officer, while Mark Vile is now chief brand officer, having been chief marketing officer previously.

Wallis joined the comparison site from recipe box startup Gousto in March 2023, to work alongside longstanding CMO Mark Vile, who has been in role since 2017. Both roles reported to the CEO.

“There are two crucial areas which inform everything Compare the Market does as a business – our customers and our brand,” a spokesperson for the business said.

“These areas will continue to be led by Tom Wallis and Mark Vile, but they will have new titles of chief customer officer and chief brand officer respectively, to make what they do really explicit.”

The chief customer and brand officer titles are new to Compare the Market. The business said that alongside the title changes the company had “reworked” the structures and teams surrounding the two to allow them to be “laser focused” on customers and brand.

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Wallis’s previous role of chief revenue officer was also a new role to the business

Speaking to Marketing Week earlier this year, Wallis said the definition of the CRO role is “developing”. At Compare the Market, he has run a dedicated revenue team across CRM, performance marketing, PPC, affiliates, display and anything that falls broadly under this remit. The business created the role to give more focus and attention to its ability to “use the scale” of its data and technology to reach customers, he said.

Vile’s role as CMO on the other hand has been more focused on attracting customers through brand. Both were roles that embodied the fundamentals of marketing, Wallis told Marketing Week.

“It’s about meeting customers’ needs in a profitable way – that doesn’t change,” he said.

According to data from LinkedIn published in January, the CRO title is the fourth fastest-growing sales and marketing job in the UK. It’s a role more typically associated with B2B organisations, ad sales and tech-based companies.

Speaking to Marketing Week about the rise of the chief revenue officer, Sarah Skinner, EMEA CEO at executive search firm Grace Blue Partnership, said the shift towards the role is part of broader industry changes.

“If we’re talking macro level, there is a shift from the CMO to the chief customer officer,” she said.

The CRO falls within this shift, she added, and reflected that marketers in many companies are sitting “much more in the heart of business decisions”.