Kohl’s puts marketing and digital under one chief customer officer

Kohl’s has created a chief customer officer job and given it to Arianne Parisi. The American department store chain announced the move on 27 August. Christie Raymond, who was chief marketing officer, leaves the company in September.

Arianne Parisi takes marketing, digital and loyalty at Kohl’s

The new post pulls several teams under one person. Parisi now runs marketing, the digital and omnichannel experience, the loyalty programme, personalisation and the whole customer lifecycle. She reports to chief executive Michael Bender. Bender said the change should bring “greater focus on the full customer lifecycle” (Kohl’s statement).

Until now those pieces sat with different leaders. Marketing owned the advertising, digital owned the site and the app, and loyalty sat somewhere between them. That split is common in retail and it is also where budgets tend to argue with each other.

Christie Raymond leaves the chief marketing officer job in September

Raymond’s departure means Kohl’s will not have a chief marketing officer at all. The title disappears into the wider role. That is worth watching, because a job title tells suppliers, agencies and candidates who signs off on what.

Kohl’s comparable sales fell 0.9 percent in the second quarter

The context is soft trading. Comparable sales at Kohl’s dropped 0.9 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2026. The company is rebuilding in-store displays for brands including Sonoma, Lauren Conrad, Nike and Levi’s, and is working on page speed and checkout online.

Neil Saunders of GlobalData Retail told Retail Dive the chain needs more than tidy operations, and pointed to exclusive products and limited-time offers as the missing energy. That is an outside view, not the company’s plan.

The ad and the checkout end up in the same budget

For marketers the useful part is the shape, not the names. When one person owns the ad, the app and the loyalty card, the argument about which channel earned the sale moves inside a single team. Measurement gets simpler and internal politics get quieter.

It is a pattern showing up elsewhere in retail. Sephora is moving product launches into TikTok Shop, and mall owner Simon has started selling ads off its own visitor data. In each case the retailer is treating its own customer as media, which needs one owner rather than three.