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Chief Merchandising and Marketing Officer (CMO)

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer
Function: Executive Leadership
Industry: Retail
Location: Bowling Green, KY

Employment Type: Full-Time

Position Summary

The Chief Merchandising and Marketing Officer (CMO) is responsible for defining and executing the company’s customer-facing growth strategy across merchandising, product assortment, pricing, promotions, brand, marketing, and customer engagement.

As a key member of the executive leadership team, the CMO brings together the art and science of retail—combining customer insight, merchant intuition, brand storytelling, and data-driven decision-making to deliver compelling assortments, differentiated customer experiences, profitable sales growth, and increased market share.

The CMO owns the connection between what we sell, how we position it, and how we bring customers to the brand, ensuring merchandising and marketing operate from one integrated customer and commercial strategy.

Key Responsibilities

Merchandising & Commercial Strategy

• Develop and lead the enterprise merchandising strategy aligned with the company's brand positioning, customer promise, and financial objectives.
• Own assortment architecture, category strategy, product selection, pricing, promotional strategy, and merchandise lifecycle management.
• Establish a disciplined merchandise planning process that balances sales growth, margin, inventory productivity, and customer demand.
• Identify emerging customer, product, category, and competitive trends and translate them into commercial opportunities.
• Partner with sourcing, supply chain, planning, operations, and finance to optimize inventory investment, availability, turns, markdowns, and gross margin.
• Build differentiated assortments across national brands, owned brands/private label, exclusive products, and other strategic product opportunities as applicable.
• Establish clear category roles, good-better-best architecture, price points, and value propositions.
• Develop vendor and strategic brand partnerships that improve assortment differentiation, economics, innovation, and customer relevance.

Marketing & Brand Leadership

• Define and steward the company's brand strategy, positioning, value proposition, and customer promise.
• Lead integrated marketing across brand, digital, social, content, CRM/loyalty, email, paid media, local/store marketing, partnerships, and traditional channels as appropriate.
• Develop an annual marketing and promotional calendar integrated with merchandising priorities and financial plans.
• Strengthen customer acquisition, retention, frequency, engagement, and lifetime value.
• Ensure marketing investment is measurable and allocated toward the channels and programs delivering the strongest incremental returns.
• Lead customer segmentation, personalization, loyalty, and lifecycle marketing strategies.
• Ensure consistent brand expression and messaging across stores, e-commerce, advertising, digital channels, and customer communications.

Integrated Customer & Growth Strategy

• Create one integrated commercial strategy connecting customer insight ? assortment ? pricing ? promotion ? marketing ? experience ? loyalty.
• Translate customer insights and market trends into actionable merchandising and marketing strategies.
• Identify new growth opportunities across categories, customer segments, channels, partnerships, services, and markets.
• Partner with digital and technology leaders to improve personalization, customer journeys, digital merchandising, and omnichannel experiences.
• Champion a customer-first mindset throughout the organization while maintaining strong commercial and financial discipline.

Financial & Performance Leadership

• Own or co-own key foundational metrics including:
• Comparable sales and total revenue growth
• Gross margin and merchandise margin
• Inventory turnover and productivity
• Markdown and promotional effectiveness
• Market share
• Customer acquisition and retention
• Traffic and conversion
• Average transaction value
• Customer frequency and lifetime value
• Marketing ROI and incremental return on advertising spend
• Brand awareness and consideration

• Partner with the CFO and COO on annual operating plans, forecasts, investments, and long-range strategic planning.
• Establish rigorous performance management, analytics, testing, and post-event evaluation across merchandising and marketing.
• Balance short-term performance with long-term brand health and sustainable profitable growth.

Organizational Leadership

• Lead, develop, and inspire high-performing merchandising and marketing organizations.
• Build strong leadership teams with clear accountability, succession plans, and talent development.
• Break down traditional organizational silos between merchandising, planning, marketing, digital, stores, and other customer-facing functions.
• Establish operating rhythms that enable faster decisions and clearer accountability.
• Develop a culture that combines customer focused, merchant creativity, analytical rigor, speed, and financial accountability.
• Serve as a trusted strategic advisor to the CEO, Board, and executive leadership team.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive leadership experience in retail, consumer products, e-commerce, or a closely related customer-driven industry.
• Significant executive leadership experience overseeing merchandising, marketing, or broader commercial functions.
• Demonstrated success delivering profitable sales growth and improving merchandising and/or marketing performance at scale.
• Deep understanding of retail merchandising, assortment planning, pricing, promotions, inventory economics, and category management.
• Strong knowledge of modern brand and performance marketing, including digital acquisition, CRM, loyalty, personalization, and marketing measurement.
• Proven ability to use customer insights, analytics, and financial data while maintaining strong merchant and brand instincts.
• Experience leading large, cross-functional teams through transformation and change.
• Strong financial acumen with demonstrated understanding of retail P&L economics.
• Experience working effectively with COOs, Boards, executive teams, and external business partners.
• Bachelor's degree preferred.

Leadership Profile

The successful CMO will be:

Customer-focused. Starts with a deep understanding of the customer and translates that understanding into differentiated products, experiences, and communications.

A merchant at heart. Has strong product instincts, understands what makes assortments compelling, and recognizes emerging opportunities before they become obvious.

Financially rigorous. Understands the economics behind every decision and can connect merchandising and marketing activities directly to sales, margin, inventory, and enterprise value.

Brand-minded. Understands how to build long-term brand equity while delivering near-term business performance.

Data-informed, not data-bound. Uses analytics and testing aggressively while recognizing when judgment, creativity, and merchant instinct are required.

An enterprise leader. Thinks beyond functional boundaries and makes decisions based on what is best for the customer and the overall business.

A talent builder. Attracts exceptional leaders, develops future executives, establishes clear accountability, and creates a high-performance culture.

A change leader. Comfortable challenging legacy practices, simplifying processes, and moving an organization toward a faster, more integrated, customer-centric operating model.

Measures of Success

Success in the role will be demonstrated by:

• Sustainable comparable-sales and market-share growth
• Improved gross margin and merchandise productivity
• Stronger inventory turns and reduced markdown dependency
• Increased customer traffic, conversion, frequency, and retention
• Improved marketing effectiveness and return on investment
• Greater brand awareness, consideration, and customer preference
• More differentiated and productive merchandise assortments
• Stronger integration between merchandising and marketing
• Successful development and retention of high-performing leadership talent
• Consistent delivery of the company's strategic and financial objectives

Executive Mandate

The CMO is ultimately accountable for answering three critical retail questions:

Are we selling the right products?
Are we giving customers compelling reasons to choose us?
Are we converting those choices into sustainable, profitable growth?

The role brings merchandising and marketing together under a single executive leader to ensure the company's product, value, brand, and customer strategies reinforce one another and create a differentiated position in the marketplace.

How to Apply:

Interested candidates should submit their application through Paylocity.

Houchens Industries is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.   

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As part of our commitment in creating a fair, efficient, and consistent hiring process we may use artificial intelligence (AI) to help our recruiting teams organize, summarize, and analyze information provided by candidates, including resumes, application responses, and other materials submitted during the application process.AI may be used to identify patterns, highlight relevant skills, and experience, and assist in comparing a candidate’s qualifications with the requirement of a specific role. These tools are to improve efficiency and consistency while supporting more informed hiring decisions, which will ultimately be made by the hiring team.