A Commentary on “Chief Marketing Officers’ Discretion and Firms’ Internationalization: An Empirical Investigation”

While it is a relatively recently published article, Kumar et al.’s (2021) contribution provides an excellent exemplar of work published in the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) that is likely to shape the next generation of research in International Business (IB) and International Marketing (IM). The article introduces an important new variable, chief marketing officer (CMO) presence in the top management team (TMT), and moderator, CMO discretion, to enhance understanding and variance explained in the firm’s degree of internationalization. This study is not only important for IB theory and research but will likely also have spillovers that are important for the “mainstream” literature in management and marketing. In this commentary, I consider two important issues. First, I focus on unpacking and assessing the direct contributions of this work. Second, I elaborate on how it is likely to spawn new research and detail some of the most fertile areas for such future work on the subject.